Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  The helot reached for her wrist with its one remaining hand, but it wasn't strong enough. Red ripped back, coming away with a handful of flesh and metal hoses. The worker sank to its knees, spitting blood and breath from the wound, and twisted away onto the deck.

  Red dropped the handful next to the convulsing worker, then turned to see the bald woman trying to get the hatch open. "Oh, for sneck's sake!"

  She walked quickly over to the hatch, grabbed the woman's shaven head and bounced it off the metal. The Iconoclast sagged like a loose sack, crumpling among her robes.

  The lab was suddenly quiet. One of the helots had stopped moving, the other was twitching fitfully. Red ignored them and trotted over to the time engine.

  There was a circular area around the base of its tower that looked to Red as though it was due to be fitted with some kind of shield, and curved gantries curled up and around it like grasping talons coming up through the deck. The tower was lower here than in the lightning vault, and plainly rigged from a variety of materials. Whatever experiments the Archaeotechs planned here, they were still a long way from completion.

  Red stood at the base of the tower for some time, then walked back into the lab. She raised the magnum, aimed carefully along the top of the barrel, and put a shot directly into the heart of the engine.

  The bolt struck dead on, and caromed way with a deafening snarl. Behind Red, a workstation blew itself to fragments.

  "Bloody hell!" Red ducked as chunks of metal and ceramic whipped past, streaking tracks of smoke through the air. The magnum bolt hadn't marked the time engine, hadn't even marred its liquid finish. It had reflected back with the same, if not more, power than it had left the barrel with.

  Red looked back at the workstation, which was burning fitfully, sending a column of greasy smoke towards the ceiling. If there was one thing she wasn't going to do, she decided, it was fire at the engine again.

  There had to be another way. She went back to the tower and began scanning the cables fixed into it. The power leads were obvious from their colouring and the warnings around their sockets on the tower base, but there were a host of others - data-feeds and pulse-monitors, links to sense-engines and crystal recorders. It was a maze.

  It made sense.

  Amazingly, Red found herself looking at the swarm of ducts and wires and knowing what they meant. Not from what she could see - the Iconoclast wiring protocols were fairly impenetrable - but from the way they connected to the time engine itself.

  She reached up into the tower's guts and tugged one of the cables free. Something inside her, some distant part of her mind that she could access directly, knew what to do.

  No. She remembered what to do.

  One day, she would build this machine. In the timeline, the reality where she would become Brite Red, she would design the time engine from scratch, knowing it could be built, remembering, from this moment, how it should be wired. Which cables were the primary power feeds, which were the secondary voltage regulators, where the data inputs needed to be.

  It was all clear to her, in a hazy, baffled way.

  Red began to pull the cables free, twisting them hard to unlock them. She swapped three of the power feeds, rerouted the data into a feedback loop that would prevent the engine modifying its own energy supply, found a kilovolt socket and plugged a gigavolt feed into it. She worked fast, at times almost letting her eyes close. Trusting, as she so often did, to pure instinct.

  By the time she'd finished, the woman on the floor was beginning to stir. Red thought idly about biting her, but decided against it. There really wasn't time.

  She trotted over to the workstations. Apart from the one that was on fire, the rest were active. Red set up a command chain, looped it and hit the key to initiate the power feed. Then she put her fingers under the edge of the control board and pulled hard.

  The board came up in pieces. Red pulled them free of their cable and hurled them away, then glanced back at the time engine.

  It was starting to turn.

  She grinned. The device would power itself up with a series of completely incorrect voltages, realise its mistake too late and then try to vent the power away, but the paths it would normally send the excess power to were rerouted back into its own sensors. The machine was doomed. It was going to blow itself to atoms and there wasn't a bloody thing anyone could do about it.

  The bald woman was dragging herself into a corner. Red stopped on her way back to the hatch, picked up the needler and then went over to the woman, crouching next to her. "Hi," she said.

  "Drink me if you have to, monster," she spat back, "but take it all. Don't enslave me like the heretic."

  Red chuckled. "You really have got me all wrong, you know that?"

  "Devil!"

  "Oh, whatever. I just thought I'd let you know that your precious time machine's going to explode in about twenty minutes. So if I were you, I'd drag my sorry arse out of this lab and jettison it before it hurts anyone, okay?" She straightened up. "I'm going home."

  There was more from the woman as Red left - threats, curses - but she didn't listen. There were more important things to think about now. She unscrambled the lock with the data-pick and opened the hatch, stepping out into the corridor.

  The Custodes she had shot were gone.

  Red paused. Either someone had found the man and dragged his body away, or Iconoclasts were more immune to the toxin in those needles than she had thought.

  Both scenarios were equally bad. Red picked up the pace and began to run along the corridor. The sooner she was away from this place the better.

  12. DISCONTINUITY

  The Blasphemy was gone by the time Lydexia managed to get up. The blow the monster had given her had set Lydexia's head spinning, and her stomach threatened to rebel at any second. She was probably concussed.

  It could, however, have been far worse. The first thing Lydexia had done upon waking, even before trying to get to her feet, had been to check her neck for puncture marks.

  There were none. Then again, from what she had seen on the frozen corpse of Durham Red's duplicate, the vampire was not so careful when she fed. If Lydexia had lost blood to her, she would likely have lost half her throat in the process.

  She looked around her, willing her eyes to start focusing properly. The two helots were dead, although not all their mechanical enhancements knew it yet. There was no sign of Hirundo. And the time engine...

  The time engine was rotating on the top of the tower.

  Lydexia ran to the workstations, batting away acrid smoke from the one that was on fire. The others told her a dire story - the engine was rigged, very effectively, to detonate when it reached emission point. Should anyone be in the lab with it when that happened, it would be even betting whether they would die by the unstable time wave which would hit them when the time engine reached critical, or by the explosion that would occur a microsecond later.

  The real pity of it was that, by studying what changes the monster had made to the wiring, Lydexia could learn more about how to set up the time engine for correct operation than she otherwise could in a month of research.

  That time, however, was gone. Lydexia stumbled over to the hatch, stepped over the threshold and keyed the locking pad.

  Nothing happened.

  She tried again, with the same results. Woozily, she crouched next to the pad, and by getting her swimming eyes close to the panel realised that the lights behind it were out. There was no power getting to the lock.

  Suddenly, all the strength went out of Lydexia. She didn't have the energy to get up, to lie down, to speak. All she wanted to do at that moment was to stay there on her haunches, lean her head against the pad and let the universe go by without her. She was still there, a minute or two later, when a squad of Custodes troopers hammered along the corridor.

  They stopped a few metres away. Lydexia looked around, squinting, and saw that they had bolters levelled at her. One of them looked a lot like Hirundo.

 
"Are you injured, doctor-captain?" he asked, his voice very level.

  "She didn't bite me."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Hirundo, my throat's intact, even if my skull isn't. She hit me and rigged the time engine to explode while I was unconscious."

  She heard him approach, carefully, and felt his gloved hands at her neck. She closed her eyes and let him tilt her head this way and that. "See?"

  "She's clear." Hirundo stood up. "Fan out. Find that bitch and burn her."

  The troopers scrambled away. Lydexia felt Hirundo's hand under her arm, drawing her upright again. "How long?" he asked.

  "Less than twenty minutes, if she told me the truth."

  "She spoke to you?" Hirundo sounded horrified.

  Lydexia nodded, an action that set her brain bobbing in her skull. "She warned me about the explosion. Don't ask why, I don't know. Now something's happened to the door. I can't close it."

  "What will happen?"

  "If I can't stop it, either the chronoplast emissions or the explosion will kill everyone on this station."

  Hirundo found Lydexia a trauma kit and injected her with a good dose of war-balm. Moments later, her vision cleared, and the pain in her head was replaced by a strange, airy coolness. Lydexia knew that the injuries weren't gone, just masked, but at least she could think straight again.

  If the situation couldn't be resolved, it wouldn't matter anyway.

  She returned to the workstation. Outside in the corridor people ran and shouted, Archaeotechs leaving their labs and bolting for the docking ring. She doubted if many would make it. The elevators could only take a small number at a time, and they weren't fast. Caliban had set their speed low to avoid jolting the sensorium.

  "Fifteen minutes," she said, "or thereabouts. In God's name, where did she get the knowledge to do this?"

  "That creature is capable of anything," Hirundo replied. "She's been trying to get to the time engine ever since Chorazin. The duplicate... There is a connection, I'm just not sure what it is."

  "If we live past the next fourteen minutes, I'll buy you an ale and we can sit down and work it out together." Lydexia tapped out a command chain on an intact workstation. "Damn it. I can't access the program."

  "Can we repair this machine?" He gestured at the station the Blasphemy had wrecked, but Lydexia shook her head.

  "Not in time."

  "Then we are lost."

  "When the last minute passes," she snarled. "I'll not let that bitch thwart me. I worked too hard for this."

  She moved away from the workstation and closed her eyes. It took three breaths for the calming effects to start, so great was her distress, and the cognitive catechisms didn't come easily. But the techniques slowly battered through her anxiety and anger, until she was finally able to still her mind, take control of her own thoughts, her own heartbeat.

  Lydexia entered a computational trance.

  The cabling of the time engine flowed out into her mind's eye, spreading until she could see more clearly what changes had been wrought. The time engine's momentum was already self-sustaining, she could see that now, well past the point where merely cutting it off from its power would have any effect other than a massive, catastrophic release of chronoplasts. If she severed any of the cables, even unplugged them to reverse what the monster had done, she would initiate the emission point and kill everyone on board Ascension.

  But why wouldn't the door close?

  She went deeper, trawling her own memories. It was a power fault, she realised, a function of the way the engine was wired. Electricity that should have been going to the hatch was being routed elsewhere, which made her wonder how the monster had got out of the lab in the first place.

  Something here was very, very wrong.

  Lydexia snapped awake and threw a glance over to the workstation. The trance had lasted for no more than thirty seconds.

  She took her comm-linker from her belt and called Caliban. "My Lord Hierophant."

  "Doctor-captain, I'm getting reports of a disaster down there. What's happening?"

  "Sir, I have little time to explain. Durham Red is on this station, and she has sabotaged the time engine. Unless I can get the lab door closed and the module jettisoned in the next eleven minutes, Ascension will become a coffin."

  "I'll get a tech-team down to you."

  "My lord, there isn't time! I need the complete power-schematic of Ascension, uploaded to me here at the lab. There must be a reason why the power-routing has jammed the door, but I can't tell without that diagram."

  "Very well," he replied. "I'll send that to you immediately. I leave this matter in your hands, doctor-captain."

  Lydexia frowned. "What are you going to do?"

  "Find that bloodsucking bitch and slaughter her where she stands."

  "Best of luck," grated Lydexia, but she made sure the linker was off when she said it.

  In terms of the power schematic, Caliban was as good as his word. The diagram came through to Lydexia's workstation less than a minute later. She began to scan it visually, at the same time running it through Ascension's data-engines, pulsing virtual packets of electricity through it to see where they went.

  There was no answer.

  Nothing in the schematics told her any reason why the door might have failed. Nothing the Blasphemy had done should have caused it. In fact, it appeared that the monster had been quite careful to leave any unconnected systems alone. Purely to further her own escape, obviously.

  "There's nothing we can do," she told Hirundo after a minute or two. "There's no way to get the door closed. Even if we had enough time to lift the deck and get to the cabling there, the safety locks have engaged."

  "Safety locks?"

  "To avoid anyone being trapped in a compartment." She stepped back from the workstation, running her hand back over her scalp. "There's no way to halt the reaction, or to protect ourselves from it. Back in the lightning vault we had a forcewall, and we had..."

  She trailed off. Hirundo tilted his head, aware that she must have been working something out, and unwilling to distract her.

  "Dampers," she said finally. "I vented the power into a set of dreadnought class dampers."

  "But there are no dampers installed here."

  She shook her head. "I know, but there might be something else."

  Her fingers flew over the workstation keys, making the machine's relays chatter wildly; it had probably never been worked so hard and so fast before. Lydexia didn't much care about that, as long as the machine could run at her pace for the next six minutes. "All right, I'm bringing up details of the other experiments here. As I said earlier, I've been able to access those from day one. Ah, here we are."

  She scanned the list. Halfway down it she thumped the workstation in triumph. "That's it! The discontinuity drive!"

  "Explain."

  Lydexia stepped away from the workstation and headed for the hatch, beckoning for Hirundo to follow her. "The drive's still in its early stages. It can't power anything yet - all it can really do is route energy through its own systems and out into space. No one knows yet how to force the power into the discontinuity between jumpspace and realspace."

  "You want to vent the time engine's power through the drive!"

  "You'll make a fine scholar," she smiled. They were out in the corridor, running towards the drive laboratory. "Let's hope this door is jammed open too, or we might as well jump out of the nearest airlock."

  Thankfully, it was. Lydexia ran in and began switching workstations on. "How long?"

  "Five minutes." Hirundo ran to help her, then stopped in mid-stride. She saw him turn away, raising a comm-linker.

  For this part, she didn't need him anyway. She began running the workstations through a bonding procedure, forcing a deep link between them and those in the next lab. Once that was done, she started to scan the activation protocols for the drive.

  They seemed to be more complex than they should have been for something that didn't work yet,
but nothing she couldn't handle. "Hirundo? What's happening?"

  The Custodes paced back to her, clipping the linker back to his belt. "The Blasphemy has been cornered on the habitation deck. She ran into a crowd of panicking scholars, and a squad of Ascension's Custodes caught up with her. She's pinned down."

  "Good. Hirundo, you should go. They'll need your expertise."

  "But, doctor-captain-"

  "I'll be fine. This is something only one person can do, commander. And I need you to keep the Blasphemy in place for me. If we die, so does she."

  He nodded, and saluted her. "Thy will be done."

  She listened to the sound of his boots beating the deck until she couldn't hear them anymore, then turned back to the workstations. The bonding procedure was complete, the protocols fused. When the time engine reached emission point, its energies would be directed though the discontinuity drive and out into the void. There might be some secondary effects, and Ascension would probably be off-line for a few weeks, but its occupants would survive, which would be more than could be said for the Blasphemy, if Hirundo caught up with her.

  Lydexia walked away from the workstations, to the huge construction at the opposite end of the lab. That entire end of the module was a mass of gantry, heavy braces welded into place to hold the discontinuity drive in position. The drive itself seemed mainly pipework, a surreal conglomeration of tubes and helices cast from some pale, coppery metal. Several fat cables snaked out of it at various points to drape across the deck.

  She checked the time and saw that there was a minute to go, maybe two at the most. She wondered if she should go in to be with the time engine, but then she remembered what the effects of the previous two emissions had been, and decided that she'd better stay where she was if she wanted to retain her sight.

  The workstation began to bleat out an alarm. The time was down to less than a minute. Lydexia smiled to herself.