Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  "This is where you fail, Blasphemy," she breathed.

  The hatchway filled with searing white light.

  Lydexia looked away, her eyes stinging, and was therefore facing the discontinuity drive when the machine at the heart of the gantry turned cherry red.

  She cried out as the heat of it reached her, and dropped to the deck. The drive was shuddering in its metal cage, the vibration rattling the gantries, making the cables whip and writhe like decapitated serpents. The entire lab was shaking.

  Impossibly, the light from the hatchway was getting brighter.

  Something was going horribly wrong. The emission should have vented instantly, out through the drive and away, but instead the discontinuity drive was trying to store the power. It was building up a titanic charge within its own systems, a charge that it had never been designed to hold.

  The vibration rose to a scream.

  Lydexia had her hands over her eyes, but still the light from the hatchway was so bright that she could see her own finger bones through her closed lids, and it was getting brighter.

  Behind her, the drive was still heating up. Had she been physically able to get her hands away from her face, Lydexia was sure that it would have been glowing white-hot.

  And then, in the space of one heartbeat, the light died.

  It didn't just fade. Lydexia still had her eyes covered, so she couldn't be sure if what she saw happen was real or a trick of her panicked mind, but it seemed to her that the light didn't just disappear, it withdrew, as though it was being sucked out of the hatchway and back into her lab. In that tiny fraction of a second the light retreated and she was plunged into darkness.

  The discontinuity drive detonated.

  The searing hot core of it flashed apart in a great cloud of molten metal. Lydexia felt the air it displaced rush around her, scalding her, and she screamed, the sound of her voice drowned by the cacophony of the gantry exploding.

  Great metal braces flew past her, crashing through the module's inner wall and into the corridor beyond, and as Lydexia saw them strike the module, the entire station was struck by a force so massive, so powerful, that her consciousness had no choice but to flee before it.

  She awoke in a void, sightless and without feeling.

  Panic gripped her and her heart hammered. Her eyes were open, blinking furiously, but she could see only blackness. She must have been lying down, but she couldn't feel the deck against her body. Even her hearing was affected - the hum of the air system was gone, leaving her in almost total silence. It was terrifying.

  Then, out of the darkness, an orb of light drifted past her.

  Lydexia stared at it incredulously, watching its light dim slightly as it slid along. It drew close, and she realised that she could smell it, the hot reek of burning metal, and feel its heat against the skin of her face.

  Her perceptions switched with a jolt. She hadn't been blinded or left without feeling by the explosion. The power was out.

  The orb was a blob of liquefied metal, probably from the discontinuity drive, which meant that she hadn't been unconscious for very long. She couldn't see because the module's lumes were dead, couldn't feel the deck because she was floating in mid-air. And the reason that there was no sound from the air system was that it had stopped working.

  That sent another spike of panic through Lydexia's gut. Whatever had happened to the discontinuity drive had killed the power to this part of Ascension. If she didn't get out soon, she would suffocate, or freeze when the module's heat leached out into space. The air around her was already cooling.

  Lydexia reached out, trying to find a surface, and eventually caught something with her fingertips and dragged herself close to it. Once she had a good grip on the object she began to run her hands over it, and by touch alone determined that she was holding onto the side of a workstation. That made it easy to orientate herself in the lab, and put her feet down on the floor. They wouldn't stay there if she tried to move, but she was pathetically grateful to find herself the right way up again.

  She had trained in zero-g manoeuvres and combat, back in the archo-seminary, but had never expected to use them.

  Now she knew where she was, she began to look around in more detail. There were small sources of light around her - more spots of glowing metal, an indicator from her comm-linker, but nothing from any device that drew power from the station itself. The module, perhaps even the entire lab deck, was totally without energy.

  The indicator light on her comm-linker drew her attention again. She freed the device from her belt and switched it on. "Hirundo?"

  There was no answer. She tried again and got the same result, so she switched channels to that of Caliban's crypt-key. "My lord? Elu?"

  Silence from that, too. Lydexia began to wonder if she was the only living thing on the station.

  She needed a source of light if she was going to go much further. There had been a container of tools next to the workstations when she had come in, left by some fleeing technician. Its contents were now drifting silently all around her.

  Something tumbled past, and she grabbed it, brought it to her face and used the linker's indicator lume to study it. She'd been hoping it was a flashlight of some kind, but all she'd grabbed was a cabling burner, a precision blowtorch for welding and severing heavy power feeds.

  It wasn't exactly what she had been after, but it was a start. Lydexia flicked the thing on, then spent a few minutes using its meagre, bluish glow to hunt down a flashlight.

  Once she had that, it was time to leave the module. She pushed herself away from the workstation towards the open hatch, sailing quick and sure through the littered air, then grabbed at the frame to slow herself and peer outside.

  The corridor was a tangled mess of wreckage and shattered gantry. To the right, the space was completely blocked from floor to ceiling. The left-hand way, back towards the time engine lab, looked just as bad, but when she examined it more closely she discovered a place near the deck where, if she squeezed, it would be possible to get through.

  She touched the nearest gantry, lightly, and as she did the entire mass groaned a warning.

  She backed off, breathing hard. The wreckage was unstable, and even without gravity any one of those mangled braces would be massive enough to flatten her. If she waited where she was, a rescue team might find her before she suffocated or died of cold.

  There was every chance, however, that they would not.

  Lydexia chose a quick death over a slow one, and shrugged out of her robes. The armour she wore beneath was figure hugging and quite smooth, apart from where the comm-linker clipped on, so she freed the device and slipped it into the top of her boot. Then, with a prayer on her lips and the flashlight clamped between her teeth, she put her head into the tangle and pushed herself through.

  When she was halfway there, the lights came back on.

  She saw the lumes above her blinking and flickering, and immediately the wreckage shuddered. The gravity was restarting.

  A gantry above her, tonnes in weight, slipped down and hit her in the small of the back.

  She screamed, spitting out the flashlight, and scrambled forward. The gantry had snagged on something, the gravity still not at full strength, and Lydexia was able to tear herself out from beneath it. She came up on the other side of the tangle just seconds before the entire mass shifted and collapsed down into the space below.

  The gantry that had pinned her was now, she could see, buried half a metre into the tiled deck.

  Lydexia got to her feet, slowly, her head spinning and stomach threatening to rebel. The return of gravity was making her internal organs settle back into their normal configuration, and after such a frantic struggle she was finding the transition highly uncomfortable.

  It was brief, though. As her heartbeat slowed back to something approaching a sane rate, the nausea started to fade too.

  She looked around, squinting in the dim emergency light.

  Much of the damage seemed to be
confined to the areas around the time engine lab and that containing the discontinuity drive. The rest of the corridor was reasonably clear, although the floor around her was littered with shattered tiles and broken panelling. Whatever had shaken Ascension had done so badly enough to cause structural damage everywhere she looked, which didn't make Lydexia feel very comfortable about the station's pressure integrity. She breathed quietly, listening for the sound of escaping atmosphere.

  If there had been any, she would have heard it. Apart from the renewed, slightly wheezing hum of the air system, the deck was eerily silent.

  She moved on, heading towards the elevators. As she neared them she noticed the corpses.

  Two scholars were slumped on the deck, very still, sprawled and tangled in their own clothing as if they had been flung down by a petulant giant. Lydexia stopped to check for any vital signs, but there were none on the first body. There was no point checking the second, after she pulled the hood aside and saw what was left of its face. She couldn't even determine from that shattered mess whether the scholar had been male or female.

  Blood and fluid surrounded the bodies in strange patterns. It had drifted in the lack of gravity for some minutes before dropping back to the deck.

  Lydexia left them where they lay, stepping over the blood to reach the elevators. Along with the gravity and life-support, they should have been one of the systems fully restored under emergency power. Non-essential components might be reduced to half-strength or even left completely powerless until the reactor came back on line, but people would always need to get from one deck to another.

  She pressed the call command. The elevator car must have been very close to the lab deck, because its doors parted almost immediately.

  As they did, a gun barrel with a bore so wide she could have stuck her thumb down it poked from between them and stopped to rest against her forehead.

  "Nice timing," snarled the Blasphemy. "Now how about telling me what the sneck you've done to this place?"

  13. CENTRE PARKING

  As soon as Red marched the Archaeotech woman back into the laboratory module, she saw that the time engine was still intact. She stopped at the threshold, covering the woman with the magnum, and glared at the silvery construction perched on its clawed tower.

  "Bastard," she snarled at it. "What the sneck have I got to do to kill you?"

  "You've already failed twice, monster," the Archaeotech hissed. "Here and on Chorazin. Why don't you give up and return to the pit you crawled out of?"

  "Temper." Red lowered the gun and stepped closer to her. "What's your name?"

  "You'll never know. I may lose my soul to you, like those others you've turned, but I'll not lose my name as well."

  "I'll just call you doctor-captain then, shall I?"

  The woman's eyes widened. "Where did you hear that?"

  "Oh, sneck. You people, honestly." Red shook her head in exasperation. "One minute you're wandering around telling me I'm the ultimate evil, the arch-bastard who's going to bring all humankind to its knees, and the next you think I'm too dim to listen outside a door. I heard you earlier, just before I came in and you set those poor helots on me."

  The Archaeotech looked slightly taken aback. "Sorry," she said reflexively.

  "Forget it. I get that all the time." She holstered the magnum. "For the record, I'm not the ultimate anything, okay? Except possibly kisser."

  "I'd rather not consider that."

  "Don't worry, you're not my type." She leaned close. "I tell you what, though. You've got the worst case of sunburn I've ever seen."

  The woman's hands went reflexively to her face, and Red saw her wince in sudden pain. Her face and scalp were a livid pink, with vague patches of paler skin on either side of her nose. Her lips were dry and cracked, the tattoos covering her head beginning to blur under flaking skin. She looked as though she had fallen asleep on a hot beach with her hands over her eyes.

  "Cell damage," she whispered. "The heat from the discontinuity drive, maybe. Or the chronoplast emission..." Her face suddenly twisted in rage. "Curse you, monster! The time engine has poisoned me - this is your doing."

  "I told you to shut the bloody door."

  "It wouldn't shut," Her voice had risen to a scream. "Your infernal re-wiring robbed it of all power."

  Red gaped. "What, me? Bollocks. I never went near the hatch cables."

  "My wiring was correct."

  "Sneck your wiring!" Red spun away and stalked across the lab. "It doesn't matter anyway. Whatever you did in here stopped the time engine blowing up, but took the main power out at the same time. By the time it comes back up I'm going to be long gone."

  She flipped her comm-linker on. "Jude? You still with me?"

  There was no reply. Red frowned at the linker, checked to make sure all its indicator icons were lit, and tried again. "Godolkin? Jude? Hey guys, don't make me start getting funny ideas about what you might be doing out there, okay?"

  "I couldn't reach anyone either," said the Archaeotech dully. "I think the comms signals must be blocked."

  "Why would anyone do that?" She glanced over at the woman, who was sagging against the workstation. "Hey, are you all right?"

  "Blasphemy, I've been knocked senseless twice in twenty minutes, and now I'm being held prisoner by the creature that has terrified me since childhood." She looked up, her eyes glistening. "So no, I'm not all right."

  "Childhood? I wasn't around then."

  "The stories of you were. My father used to tell me the tales to frighten me, to make sure I spent enough time at prayer and my studies. God, the nightmares I had about you, Saint Scarlet of Durham, the mutant who ate babies and drank blood, and how one day she would wake up and tear the throats out of all the naughty children."

  "And here I am," Red replied quietly.

  "Here you are. Not the baby-eater I once feared, perhaps." The Archaeotech was studying her, looking her up and down. "Maybe just a mutant woman who drinks blood, as the heresies have been saying. But the fact remains that you are here to destroy my life's work. And in the process, you will probably kill us all."

  "Not if I can help it." Red went back to join her. "You've got one thing right about me. I have come to destroy the time engine, because if I don't I know what you people will do with it. Surely you realise what a powerful weapon you've got there?"

  The woman shrugged. "That's not my division. I'm an Archaeotech - we rediscover what was lost, learn all we can about it, and give that information to our superiors." She straightened slightly, pride giving her some strength. "We Archaeotechs rebuilt the Accord, monster, from the debris left behind after the Bloodshed. We gave humankind back the stars."

  "And what will you give them with this? The future?" Red gestured at the time engine, waiting impassively on its tower. "Or a past where mutants never came to be? Doctor-captain, you're a smart girl. You know damn well they'd start a time war with this. Your High Command would rip the universe to shreds trying to re build history in their own image."

  "You don't know that."

  "Oh, I do. I'm a mutant; I know very well how things work around here. You gave them the Accord? How are you going to feel when they tear it apart again?"

  The woman turned back to the engine. "I can't," she breathed. "I just can't."

  "Don't you think," Red asked her, very gently, "that you've got more important things to think about right now?"

  "Ascension..." The woman glanced back, startled.

  "Yeah. I don't know about you, but something doesn't feel right about this place. The wiring, the jammed comms... Help me get in touch with my ship, so I can find out what's going on. And then we'll talk about the time engine."

  It wasn't much of a deal, but perhaps the Iconoclast had as bad a feeling about the station as Red did. After a few seconds hesitation, she nodded.

  "Good girl," Red grinned.

  "My soul is forfeit," the woman replied, "and my name is Aura Lydexia."

  Red had been in the middle of
a particularly nasty firefight when the explosion had occurred. She had almost reached the access lock when she'd gotten tangled up in a group of panicking scholars, and then met a squad of Custodes coming the other way. They were obviously looking for her, which bore out her theory that the long-haired trooper had lived to tell the tale.

  Iconoclast shocktroopers, she knew only too well, were tough. These Keepers of the Secret were tougher still.

  The squad had driven her back into the habitation deck, and then set about trying to surround her. They had come close to succeeding, too - where many of the Iconoclasts she had met had simply waded into her in waves, certain that their righteousness would prevail, the Custodes had had more sense. They had kept formation, followed tactics and obeyed orders from people who were even smarter than they were. Red had found herself in something very much like a killing ground.

  If there was one positive facet to her side of the battle, it was that she had managed to lead the Custodes away from her hidden vacuum-shroud. But the way things had been going on the hab deck, she had started to seriously wonder if she would ever get to use it.

  Then the time engine had gone critical.

  Red had thought that she still had time to go, but the heat of battle had stolen the minutes from her. When the moment came, it was fast: Red had just drawn a bead on one trooper who was trying to work his way behind her, and in the space between squeezing the trigger and the particle bolt hitting its target Ascension had turned on its head. Red had been bounced clear off the ceiling by the impact, and had hit it hard enough to lose consciousness for a few seconds. The only reason she had survived was that everyone trying to kill her at the time had suffered the same fate.

  Some were worse off than others. The man Red had been aiming at was spared the particle bolt, but died anyway when his skull imploded against a ceiling brace.

  The power had started to flutter then, but it didn't fail completely until about half a minute later, when Red was in an elevator and trying to get back to the access lock. There must have been some residual voltage in Ascension's systems, but it had run out just in time to trap her in the lift. When it came back on, the last place Red had wanted to be was in an elevator if the power was going to start playing silly buggers, so she decided to get out at the next floor and walk.