Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  Tullus's ship, the Phaselis, wasn't all that big by Iconoclast standards, and Quadratas was an efficient installation. It took only an hour to restock Phaselis and top up the fuel load.

  Not long after that, the ship opened up another jump-point and accelerated towards Ascension. When it did so, it was carrying somewhat more in the way of crew and equipment than Prefect Tullus might have expected.

  Red had spent a productive two days while Fury had drifted towards Quadrata. She had spent the time poring over Iconoclast histories from the ship's data engines, learning as much as she could about Ascension.

  Although she was no history buff, there was a lot in the story of the lab station that she found interesting.

  Ascension's history had begun a little under two hundred years earlier, back in 627YA, when an alien object of tremendous destructive power had appeared, without warning, in orbit around the planet Kentyris Secundus. An Iconoclast fleet had been issued to deal with it, thinking it was some new mutant weapon, but the object had despatched them with ease. It then proceeded to devastate Kentyris Secundus and twenty inhabited worlds around it, killing over eight billion people, before retreating to an area of open space.

  Apart from minor changes in position, it had been there ever since.

  The object had been codenamed "Manticore" by the fleets that had first engaged it - just a random word used to designate a target. The name had stuck, to the point that the empty, lifeless area of space around the object was now known as the Manticore Gulf. A fleet of ten thousand Iconoclast warships surrounded the Manticore, watching continually for any sign that it might be ready to move into further inhabited areas and slaughter their peoples too. Although it was debatable that even that enormous fleet could do anything more than slow the object down.

  Over the years, the Manticore had been forgotten by most of the Accord. It was left to sleep behind its wall of starships, invulnerable, implacable, utterly mysterious. If any ship or probe passed within a thousand kilometres of the Manticore, it was instantly destroyed. Any further, and it was ignored.

  Just to be safe, the Bastion ships remained one-quarter of a light-year from the Manticore at all times.

  If it hadn't been for the Archaeotechs and their obsession with lost technologies, no one but the Bastion would be in the vicinity at all. There was something about the Manticore that they were interested in, interested enough for them to rebuild an old sensor-station into a fully equipped research base, and leave it in the middle of nowhere for fifty years.

  Of all the other Archaeotech temple-labs in the Accord that was where High Command had sent the time engine.

  It could only mean one thing. Somehow, the Manticore had a link with time travel.

  Omega Fury rode Phaselis all the way to Ascension, latched under its port drive nacelle with the shadow web running. By the time she got there, Red was beginning to get very worried about the amount of continuous time the web had been on. "It wasn't built for that kind of treatment," she told Harrow as she was putting the vacuum shroud on over her clothes. "You're going to have to give the thing a rest, or it'll burn out and take the power core with it."

  "It's not the shadow web I'm worried about, holy one." Harrow was with her in the staging area, checking the shroud's seals. It wasn't something he needed to do - the shroud was built so that one person could get in and out of it quite easily on their own. Red was going to end up doing that on the way back anyway, should everything go according to plan. "We should be with you."

  "Jude, the last time I went after this thing I went in mob-handed, and messed up badly. I've got to do this on my own."

  "It's suicide."

  "I'm not the suicidal type." She put her gloved hand on his shoulder. "Come on, remember your own paradox. If the Iconoclasts got the time engine working in the future they would have wiped us out already, so that means there's still a chance to frag the thing."

  Harrow looked exasperated. "Do you honestly believe that?"

  "No," she smiled, "but the longer I keep trying to work it out, the less time I've got to think about how scared I am."

  There was a burst of static from the internal comms, followed by Godolkin's voice. "Mistress, the Phaselis is holding position."

  "Great," Red called back. "Remember, nudge us away at the same time as the shuttle comes out. That should mask the manoeuvring thrusters."

  "Your will."

  Red flipped the shroud's helmet on over her head and sealed it, making sure her long hair was tucked down inside. The shroud was an awful thing to wear, a great bag of vacuum proof fabric-metal with gloved sleeves, legs with integral boots and a windowed bulge for a helmet. She had worn one before, when she had been trying to get aboard Xandos Dathan's planet killer, and had found it a trial then as well.

  At least the shroud's generous proportions enabled her to carry a full complement of equipment over, and not have to stash it in a separate container.

  The deck gave a sudden lurch, and Godolkin spoke again. "Blasphemy, we are clear. Be ready to leave."

  "Notice how quickly he switches from 'Mistress' to 'Blasphemy'?" Red shifted about inside the shroud, feeling its weight drag at her. "Like he doesn't even regard calling me Blasphemy as an insult any more. I wonder what's going on inside that bloke's head, sometimes."

  "Only darkness," said Harrow. His voice sounded flat and distorted through the shroud's sound system. "So hurry back."

  "I'll bring you a piece of time engine," she grinned, and waddled over to the docking hatch.

  Fury had three airlocks: a docking hatch on either side of the pressure cylinder and a larger lock chamber that only deployed when the landing spine was down. Red opened the hatch and clambered inside, making sure she was standing in the centre of the chamber. She didn't want to be pushed off balance when the pressure dropped.

  The hatch swung closed behind her and locked. Red tried her comms. "Godolkin, do you hear me?"

  "I do. Are you in the airlock?"

  "Yeah. Harrow's equalising now..." She broke off as the lock chamber filled with a loud hissing. The pressure system was quickly drawing the air from it. In response, Red's vacuum shroud began to swell up.

  In moments she was standing wrapped in a grey, metallic balloon. Moving her arms against its internal pressure wasn't hard, but the shroud's material had a tendency to spring them out to her sides again whenever she relaxed. The same went for her legs, and no matter how she moved her head the shroud's helmet stayed facing resolutely forwards.

  "Sneck me," she growled. "This had better be a stealth mission. I'll die of embarrassment if anyone sees me like this..."

  Godolkin's voice crackled through the comms again. "It's time, Blasphemy. I've tried to orientate Fury so that a jump from the lock will take you directly towards Ascension, but it will be up to you to locate the access hatch and get in."

  "No problem. And remember, get Fury to a safe distance as soon as you can, and shut that bloody web down. You'll need it working if this all goes pear-shaped again." Although, Red thought as soon as she had spoken, the only thing really pear-shaped around here is this space suit.

  She reached out and keyed the hatch open. It slid aside, and suddenly Red was looking into deep space.

  There was an object right ahead of her, a dumbbell shaped cluster of cylinders made from flat, grey metal. It was hard to make out any details on it, because there were no stars close by, and so the only light that shone on it came from lumes on the object itself. It looked small, and close enough to reach out and grab.

  An illusion of scale. Ascension was two kilometres from the blunt reactor housing to the cluster of towers and spines that formed the sensorium, and it was turning. Or rather, Fury was turning, its thruster burst taking it away from Phaselis, but giving it a slight spin at the same time. If Red waited much longer she could end up being rotated in completely the wrong direction.

  "Now or never." She jumped.

  Instantly, she was turning. She had given herself a good pus
h away from the airlock, but the force her legs had applied could never be completely even. The stars began to arch slowly around her, taking Ascension with them. The shroud had a small thruster pack for corrective manoeuvres, but there was no way Red could risk using it. She didn't have a shadow web.

  All she could do was wait, and spin, while the dark grey shape grew slowly larger.

  It took a long time. The spin she had given herself took her, after about ten minutes, completely around until she was facing the wrong way. She tried to make out where Fury was, so perhaps she would feel a little less alone, but there was no way to see it. Every now and then her eyes would pick up a faint distortion in the stars, but they were probably just imperfections in the shroud's faceplate.

  In another ten minutes she was facing Ascension again, and now it was like looking at a building. She could see panel lines and welds, the faint variations in colour where steel patches had been fixed over meteor holes. After another few minutes she began to make out external cabling.

  She checked her course and realised that she was going to miss the station by a good hundred metres if she didn't do something. The thruster pack made little jumping movements against her back when she fired it, and although she couldn't hear it, her spin lessened.

  According to Fury's data files on this class of sensor station, there would be an engineering access hatch just under the big parabolic dish. Red fired the thrusters again, nudging her further along Ascension's spindle, and passed over the centre shield so close she could almost touch it.

  The dish was very close now. If she hit that, someone would hear it. She made one last burn, dropped towards the shadows, and hit the spindle face first.

  The access hatch wasn't where it was supposed to be, but it didn't take Red long to find it, which was a good thing, because by that time she was thoroughly sick of being inside the shroud.

  She stripped it off and stashed it inside the access lock's chamber, behind some piping. If anyone tried to use the lock they would see it straight away, but Red was hoping to be long gone before anyone came this way again.

  Along with the particle magnum, she had brought a trauma kit, a dataslate with a partial schematic of the station in its memory, a needle gun and the data-pick. The slate, however, only had a map of the station as it had been before the Archaeotechs had converted it, and as such turned out to be a lot less useful than Red had hoped. For example, it didn't show what the series of armoured modules at the base of the dish were, or what was in the spindle, or why the docking ring was so far away from the habitation decks. It made no sense.

  Eventually she gave up looking at it, and ventured into the station with only instinct to trust.

  The direction of gravity in Ascension was just as Red would have expected, with the reactor "down" and the sensorium "up". There were banks of elevators close by the access lock, and she was able to get into one without being spotted. Once there, she took a few seconds to examine the controls, and picked up some clues that way.

  On the plus side, she could now see that the modules she had spotted earlier were laboratory blocks, which sounded hopeful. On the minus, even getting the elevator to stop on those decks would require an authorised crypt-disc.

  Or a data-pick.

  Red was able to find the time engine simply by following the chaos.

  The device was obviously still being set up, which was hardly surprising. It had been here, along with whatever Archaeotechs had been in charge of it, for little more than eleven days. To install something as complex and dangerous as a time machine was never going to be just a matter of unpacking it from the crate and plugging it in.

  There were six modules around the spindle, each one wedge shaped and unconnected from the others past a circular, linking corridor. Red could see the value in that: if one of the experiments got out of hand and seemed likely to explode, its module could be jettisoned entirely. It would be hard luck on anyone inside it at the time, but could save the rest of the station.

  For a time Red wondered if she should simply rig up the time engine's module to break free, and then blast it from Fury when it was loose, but she quickly discarded the idea. She would never get back to the ship before the alarm was raised, and Fury would be shredded as soon as it tried to open fire. The Bastion was very close.

  No, it would have to be destroyed from the inside.

  Red moved around the circular corridor. It was of typical Iconoclast design, looking as if it would have been more at home in a cathedral than a space station. Arching braces were set every few metres, each one ornately carved, and the lumes between them shed a dull, bluish light onto the tiled floor below. The doors leading into the modules were wide double hatches cast from black iron, studded with rivets and warning plaques bearing brushed steel skulls, and their control panels were formed to look very much like church windows.

  In terms of design it was hardly secure. Red was halfway around the corridor when one of the hatches began to slide open, but it was so ponderous and heavy that she had ample time to duck back and squeeze herself behind a brace. Her outfit - a fabric-metal bustier and skin-tight leather trousers - was black from head to foot, partly for stealth, but mainly because it looked good on her. Against the dark grey of the station's interior she blended in quite effectively, so much so that the man who exited the hatchway walked right past her without even knowing she was there.

  It was the only time Red had to hide in the corridor. The next time she came across an open hatch, it was surrounded by empty packing material.

  Red put her head around the doorframe and then drew back. There were at least four people in the room, and one of them was a Custodes trooper. He was talking to a slender, bald woman in black leather robes, while two drably clothed workers stood amidst a swarming nest of cables.

  The woman was talking.

  "He's up to something," she was saying. "Him and that modified helot of his. They've locked me out of so much data I can barely work."

  "Are you sure it's not just station security? You are new here, and with the inspections tomorrow..."

  "No, that fool Tullus wouldn't even know where to begin. This is technical data, Hirundo, station-wide power schematics. If he's so worried about security, why can I read full reports on the other experiments, but can't get hold of a simple power diagram?"

  "Like what?" His voice was coming from a different direction now. He must have walked across the lab. "What are they doing here?"

  "There's a discontinuity drive being built in the next module. The Manticore uses something like that to move around, tapping into the imbalances between realspace and jumpspace and just skating between them. There's a new communications array, although that's not working well. Oh, and some kind of temporal bomb, would you believe?"

  "Weapons research? Here?" The Custodes was approaching the door. Red edged away, drawing the needle gun. "You're right, I don't like the sound of this either. I'll start making enquiries."

  "Thank you, commander."

  "Goodnight, doctor-captain. Don't work those helots too hard."

  She laughed. "It's what they're for, but don't tell Caliban that."

  The Custodes stepped out of the hatch. Red had moved behind a brace, but the Iconoclast whirled about immediately, reaching for the bolter slung at his side. Red was faster, bringing the needler up and sending a sheaf of splinters into his face and neck. The man opened his mouth, gave a wheezing gasp and folded forward.

  Red was in through the hatch before his body had struck the floor, keying it closed and then scrambling the crypt-lock with the data-pick.

  She had been fast, seconds at most. The woman in the black robes only noticed she was there when the pick chirruped its completion.

  Red snapped the needler up and aimed it at her face. "Don't make a bloody sound," she snarled.

  She glanced quickly around her. The two workers - helots, the Custodes had called them - were still toiling away as if nothing was wrong. The woman was over to the right of the
lab, standing at a cluster of portable workstations, her face white with shock. The time engine, already fixed onto a new tower, was over against the far wall, surrounded by cables and power feeds. It wasn't moving.

  Red drew the magnum with her free hand and waved it at the helots. "Okay you two, break time. Go and stand over there."

  Neither made any indication that she had spoken. They remained bent over their work, the metal plates set into their skulls gleaming dully in the lab's dim light. "Hey! Tweedle-dumb and Tweedle-dumber."

  "They're keyed to my voice-print, monster," the woman hissed. "They can't obey you."

  "Well bloody tell them to get over there, then."

  "Very well." She took a step backwards, edging away from the workstations, then shouted. "Helots! Kill the Blasphemy!"

  Both helots snapped their heads up simultaneously. The lens arrays they had in place of eyes whirred, their bolted shut jaws worked soundlessly. They dropped the cables they had been working on and dived towards Red.

  The workers were fast, and mechanically precise. Red got one shot off, a blast of charged particles that ripped the arm from one of the helots, but the wound didn't slow it. They struck her at the same time, bowling her over backwards.

  She hit the wall hard, losing the needler. The helots pressed their attack, three hands reaching to tear her face. She batted them away, managing to duck sideways and get under their next attack, but they followed her all the way around.

  It was like fighting machines. They had no instinct for their own preservation, just a programmed desire to rip her open.

  Red dropped into a fighting crouch, then leapt sideways and kicked out as the first helot reached her. The toe of her boot caught it solidly in the head, flinging it over. It rolled to a halt among the cables, limbs flailing, sparks and fluid spitting from the side of its skull.

  The second one, unbalanced by the loss of its arm, ran right into Red's fist. She punched it hard in the face, feeling a flare of pain as her knuckles met something a lot harder than bone under that white skin. Instead of the second punch she had been readying, she grabbed at the helot's throat, her fingers and thumb clawing into a lethal grip.