It was probably quite unlucky for Aura Lydexia, who had been waiting for that very lift to take her back up.
The communications weren't working because they were being routed through a suppression transceiver. "It's to stop transmissions interfering with the sensorium," Lydexia explained, peering at the diagram on her workstation. "Caliban's paranoid about it. That's why they put the shield halfway down the spindle."
"Caliban?"
"Ascension's operations manager." Lydexia grimaced. "I don't trust him."
"I don't trust anybody," Red replied. "What's your point?"
"My point is that he's hiding something, something big. There are things about Ascension that haven't made sense since I arrived, and I'm sure he's behind it." She left that screen and moved to another. "Here. This cabling trace should lead to the transceiver, but it doesn't, not directly. There's something in the way."
Red straightened up. Despite her success reconfiguring the time engine's cabling, this kind of engineering wasn't her strong suit. It all looked like lines to her.
"If the power was out when you first tried your linker, why didn't the call go straight through? Surely the transceiver wouldn't have picked it up."
"True." Lydexia began tapping at keys. "Um. That's strange."
Red peered over to the other station, looking at the diagram upside down. "Sneck, even I know what that is. It's a jammer."
"Linked to the power feed. So if the transceiver isn't getting power, the jammer activates under stored charge, then picks up from the emergency generators." She glanced up towards the dully glowing lumes. "Which are on now."
"Health & Safety would throw a fit." Red prodded the diagram with her finger. "If the power goes out the first thing you'd do is enable communications, not cut them off completely."
"I don't think safety has anything to do with this." Lydexia stood back, running her hand reflexively over her scalp. "This is Caliban's work."
Red could understand the idea behind the transceiver - if the sensorium was so finely tuned it could pick up sense-readings from a quarter of a light-year away, it would be sensible to try to protect it from stray crypt-signals. The comm-linker devices used in the Accord tended to be brute things, uncomplicated but powerful, forcing their signals into the quantum relay network for faster-than-light transmission. Caliban wouldn't want that kind of noise showing up on his scans.
To secretly install a comms jammer that would only activate in times of the direst emergency was the opposite of sensible. It was deranged. Either that, or an act of deliberate malice.
"Okay, so we know it's there. Can you shut it down?"
Lydexia shook her head. "Not from here, but I can read its pulse frequencies from this. I might be able to alter your linker to pulse in opposition."
She put a hand out for it, and Red passed it to her. "Push my signal out through the gaps?"
"That's right. Don't expect high quality, but it might be enough to transmit simple messages."
"I don't need complicated. All I need is 'What the bloody hell happened?'"
She watched as the Archaeotech began to open up her comm-linker. She had wondered, for a moment, whether handing it over like that had been such a good idea, but Lydexia was an intelligent woman. She must have known that if she'd tried anything Red would simply have knocked her out and taken hers.
The re-wiring took a few minutes. While Lydexia worked, Red wandered to the door. "I don't hear much in the way of activity out there, do you?"
"No. I'm hoping that's because people would have either stayed on the hab deck or gone to the observation platform for answers."
"Maybe they don't trust the lifts yet."
"Maybe." Lydexia snapped the casing of the linker closed, then tapped at some of its surface icons. "Try this."
Red came back and took it from her, then input Fury's crypt-key. "Jude? Godolkin?"
Static blared out at her. She winced, holding the thing away from her ear, and tried again. "Durham Red to Omega Fury, this is getting really bloody embarrassing, over?"
This time, the static came in jerks and jumps. Buzzing sounds were trying to force their way past it. And then, sounding as if it was coming through several layers of roofing felt, a voice. "...Holy..."
"Hey, Jude!" She grinned. "Good to, er, hear you."
"One... Thought... Ascension was... Exploded..."
Red shook her head. "I'm not getting enough."
"Tell him to alter their transmission frequency to match." Lydexia pointed at the screen. "Here, this value."
Trying not to shout, Red relayed the message several times. Eventually most of the static faded out, and Judas Harrow's voice became intelligible. "Holy one, where...you?"
"I'm on Ascension, in the laboratory modules."
"Impossible! Ascension is destroyed. Holy one, we saw... own eyes. There is nothing... of it."
Red looked around. "Well," she said to herself, "if this is heaven I'm bloody disappointed."
She lifted the linker again. "Jude, stay put. I'll get back to you. Lydexia, did you get that?"
"I did, but I'm not sure I understand it. Is your kinsman telling you that Ascension was destroyed?"
"Yeah, and Jude's got some of the sharpest eyes of anyone I know, Godolkin included. If he says there was an explosion, then something blew up. I think we need to have a look outside."
There were no external viewports in the lab modules, and in fact very few in Ascension as a whole. Lydexia wondered out loud if that, too, was a part of Caliban's paranoia, but Red thought it was more likely to be a matter of economics. Synthetic diamond ports, although quite easy to make, had a certain value. And Ascension had begun life as a military sensing post. Far better to save the money and give its occupants less to distract them from their holoscreens.
There were some sense-engine feeds on Lydexia's schematics, though. "The best images will come from the docking ring," she told Red, tapping at the workstation's keyboard again. "They have high resolution pickups there. Visiting starships can log onto them and see themselves approach."
"But you can log on from here."
"Of course, Blasphemy." Lydexia gave her a sideways look. "I believe I covered how to log onto a network feed in year one of the archo-seminary."
"I don't know exactly what you said just then, " Red told her warningly, "but it sounded sarcastic. Be careful."
"Oh, I always am." The woman tapped a final key and sat back. "There."
"Where?" The screen was blank, a slab of black with occasional lines of static tracking down it. "Did you pass year one?"
Lydexia chose not to reply to that, and instead tapped at her keys again. The black screen became the network diagram, then a series of options, then went dark once more. "Nothing," she spat finally. "How can that be?"
"Try another location. Are there pickups on the spindle?"
There were, but they were as lifeless as those on the docking ring. Lydexia threw her hands up. "Caliban. He's jammed the external feeds."
Red leaned in, over her shoulder, making her flinch away. "Don't panic, I'm just having a go. Let's see if there are any closer to home... Hey. Third time lucky."
As she spoke, the smile died on her face. Lydexia gasped out a curse, then a prayer.
The pickup Red had accessed was mounted just below the lab modules, and its view was aimed down the spindle. It should have been blocked by the shield halfway between the reactor and the observation deck.
The shield, however, was no longer fixed to Ascension.
Where it had once been mounted were now only a few twisted ribbons of metal. Some panels of it still survived over to the right of the pickup's view, but most of it was lost. There was nothing to protect the sensorium from the reactor, or the random emissions of starships as they berthed at the docking ring.
The ring was gone, too, and the reactor. "Holy Christ," Red said sickly. "No wonder the pickups were blank."
Ascension had been blown in half.
The spin
dle terminated just past the wreckage of the shield, in a sprawl of debris. Wisps of ruined gantry poked out past the ruptured plating, along with trailing cables and long metal tubes that would once have housed elevators. Some emergency system within Ascension must have closed off the lift shafts, along with every other open duct in the spindle, when the explosion occurred. If it hadn't, the station would have haemorrhaged its entire atmosphere in minutes.
The spindle looked like a severed limb, ragged and broken, its mechanics drooling out into the void.
"Harrow did see an explosion. He saw the reactor going up. When the time engine went critical it must have somehow overloaded the reactor, blown it to bits..."
She trailed off. Lydexia was shaking her head. "Blasphemy, you're wrong. Look at the stars."
Red put her face closer to the little screen, and with a jolt of panic saw what the Iconoclast meant. She'd not even noticed before, so stunned was she by the damage to Ascension. But around it, the stars were moving, arching down and away. Ascension was not only turning end over torn end, but it was racing through space at the same time.
It couldn't have been shoved that hard by the reactor exploding. Fist sized chunks of it, maybe, but nothing more intact than that.
"Here's the answer you seek, mutant," Lydexia said flatly. "Your Harrow saw the reactor and docking ring destroyed, and thought you had died with it, because the rest of Ascension was no longer there. We were already millions of kilometres away." She was bringing up a new screen on the workstation, one that Red recognised from Fury. It was a stellar cartography grid, its crosshairs homing in on a point in space.
"How?"
"The discontinuity drive." The Iconoclast nodded sideways, towards the next lab. "Caliban's records showed it to be almost useless, just a test bed for venting energy into space, but that was another lie. It's working, or rather it was when I used the time engine to power it up.
We moved almost a quarter of a light-year while the reactor was detonating, Durham Red. Directly towards the Manticore."
"I was right about you, doctor-captain."
This was a man's voice, from behind them. Red spun, drawing the magnum as fast as she ever had, bringing it up to firing position, and letting it drop before it was halfway there, as soon as she saw that the voice had come from one of the workstations.
She wandered over to it and peered at the flatscreen built into its control board.
The picture it showed was obviously a feed from inside some kind of starship. A man sat strapped into a luxurious command throne, facing the pickup, with a pale, grey robed young woman standing at his side. From the cut of his clothes, and the calm authority of his face, she knew instantly who had spoken.
"Let me guess," she growled. "Caliban."
"The Lord Heirophant General Malchus Caliban to you, monster." He spat the words. Beside him, the helot-woman flinched at the sound of his disgust.
He was older than Red might have expected, his eyebrows and beard silver grey against the deep tan of his face. His scalp was shaved, like every other Archaeotech scholar she had seen, and webbed with ritual tattoos, but that was where the similarity ended. This man, she could tell, was more warrior than scientist. He must have served his time in the regular forces before giving himself to the Archaeotech cause.
Caliban was clad in a long, high collared coat of black silk trimmed with gold, and the armour beneath it was ornate. "All dressed up and nowhere to go," sneered Red. "Oh, and that's Miss Monster to you, dipstick."
The man gave her a mirthless, twisted smile. "Such wit, for someone so nearly dead." He glanced back at someone cowering at the edge of the pickup's field of view - a small, florid official in black robes. "You see, Prefect? Hardly the nightmare we've been led to expect."
"Don't speak to it," hissed the official, quaking. "The filth will curse you with its witch tongue, Caliban. See - your doctor-captain already consorts with the beast."
Lydexia snorted. "Their opinion of you seems even worse than mine, Blasphemy."
"I'm used to it." She spread her hands. "So come on, Caliban. Fess up. How long have you been planning this?"
"I have no idea what you mean."
"Balls." She glanced at Lydexia. "What's he got here again? A drive that's finished when he says it isn't, and shoots half the station right at the Manticore. A comms array that's 'not working' either. What else was it?"
"A temporal bomb," replied Lydexia. "And I can guess that's far further along the developmental trail than your records might suggest."
Caliban sighed. "It is. Doctor-captain, I once told Elu that you were a risk to me, and here you are proving me right again. I should have brought you aboard far sooner - you were wasted on Chorazin."
"And what would I have done had you summoned me, my Lord? Helped you turn this station into a weapon?"
"Everything we do is a weapon, Aura." He leaned forward in the throne, his hands on either side of the pickup. On the screen, he loomed. "We both know it. We are Iconoclasts. Our duty is to the survival of the human race. That creature beside you is nothing compared to what's truly out there. Nothing!"
"Our duty is to knowledge."
"Our duty is to life! Aura, I know how dangerous the Manticore is. My father knew, and the knowledge killed him. But no one will listen, no one will let us do what must be done. So yes, I've turned Ascension into a weapon, in secret, because the Patriarch is in love with that nightmare." He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. "He thinks it's going to give him access to time travel, if only we could study it hard enough."
"And what do you think?"
"I think you know I'm right. Even if you've been tainted by that creature at your side. Elu?"
"Yes, my Lord?" The grey cloaked helot turned her single remaining eye to him, and Red could see nothing in it but adoration.
"What time is it?"
"Twenty-three thirty-seven GST, my Lord."
Caliban nodded grimly. "Time we were away, then. Doctor-captain, I wish things were different. Fate and the Blasphemy have conspired against us. I always intended Ascension to be empty when it launched, but it was not to be. I'm sorry."
"You're sorry?" snapped Red incredulously. "Not as sorry as we'll be when the Manticore fries our arses!"
"That won't happen," he replied with little malice. "Your obsession with destroying the time engine has accelerated my plans, but not altered them. The Manticore has a tolerance range of just over one thousand kilometres. The temporal bomb is tuned to detonate at twice that distance." He leaned back in the throne and raised his head. "And when it does, everything within ten thousand kilometres will be projected roughly a million years into the past. I've heard that you are resilient, monster, and almost certainly quite resistant to aging, but I doubt that even you would last that long."
Not without turning into Brite Red, she thought sourly. "I don't know. Maybe I'll wait around for you and tell you all about it."
"In which case," he smiled, "have a good trip."
The screen went dead.
Red made a disgusted sound. "You know, back in my day we had people who acted like bastards because they were stupid and greedy and evil. Now everyone acts like that because they think it's the right thing to do..."
Lydexia rounded on her. "Is this really a time for philosophy, monster? Your actions have destroyed us all!"
"We're not dead yet." She lifted the comm-linker and showed Lydexia the 'transmit' icon. "Jude, did you get all that?"
"Much of it, holy one. And we're... our way."
"Tell Godolkin to put his foot down. He wouldn't want to miss this."
"Well...There, Red. Hang on."
The Iconoclast was glaring at her. "So what do you propose to do? Sit and wait while your friends rush to the rescue? Assuming that they can even get past the Bastion."
"Are you kidding? They'd never get here in time." Red crouched to pick up the magnum. "They'll get through the Bastion, but they haven't got time to calculate a superlight jump, let alo
ne get here on thrusters."
"As I tried to tell you. We're lost."
"You might be. Caliban's an arrogant bastard, and that kind always makes mistakes. What we need to do is find the ones he's made and use them to our advantage. Get everyone off this station, into whatever shuttles or escape pods we can find, and get the sneck off this thing!"
Or, she thought worriedly, it's going to be a really long trip.
14. TIME TO DIE
The video feed from outside the station was still active on Lydexia's workstation. Red watched Caliban's ship peeling away from Ascension, its drives flaring. "Where did he get that?"
"It's the Prefect's shuttle," Lydexia replied. "Monster, you're not understanding me. It doesn't matter whether he has a ship or not. There's nothing he can do. Caliban was dead the moment the discontinuity drive activated. As I am, and you are."
Red pointed a finger at the woman's face. "You are starting to be a real killjoy, you know that?"
"We are inside the Gulf!" Lydexia yelled, slamming her hand down on the cartography screen. "There is nothing here; no surviving colonies, no life, no hospitable worlds. Nothing. The Manticore devastated it all - if Caliban was right about anything, it was about just how deadly it is."
"Lydexia, the Gulf's not that big. What, half a light-year?"
"It's not the distance, monster." The Archaeotech sighed, dropping into one of the workstation seats. "There's no way through. The Bastion isn't just a fleet - it's a total blockade. There are multiple layers of defence that have been built up over decades, purely for the purpose of making sure that nothing, not so much as a missile, ever leaves the Gulf. Atomic mines, jumpspace drones, vortex relays... It's possible, maybe, that your ship will get into the Gulf from outside, but it will never leave. None of us will. The Bastion is impregnable."
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