Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  "Nothing's impregnable," Red replied. Not when you've got an invisible spaceship, anyway.

  That last thought she kept very much to herself. Fury's existence wasn't something she wanted to broadcast, least of all to an Archaeotech. The shadow web was very much a lost technology, a relic of the Stealth Wars, resurrected by the Omega warriors. If Lydexia ever learned of it she would be stripping it off in seconds, just to see how it worked.

  Red glanced back at the screen and saw that Caliban's ship had shrunk to a bright dot, only distinguishable from the stars by the way it moved. "Maybe you're ready to give up, but I'm not. You've got two choices, Lydexia. One is to sit here and wait for the bomb to go off, or for the Manticore to take a dislike to you and do what it did to that fleet back in six twenty-seven. Or you can try and get off this junk pile in time to watch the fireworks, and then think about what to do next."

  The woman looked up at her. "What are you going to do?"

  "What do you think?"

  Lydexia sat for a few seconds, her hands clasped together, staring off into space. Red was just about to leave the woman to her misery when she spoke. "The bomb will destroy the Manticore."

  "That's the plan."

  "If the Manticore is gone, there'll be no reason for the Bastion to stay in formation."

  Red shrugged. "That must have been what Caliban's betting on. He's a clever bloke, doctor-captain. He wouldn't have zoomed off without an exit worked out."

  The Archaeotech seemed to straighten a little. "Don't count on it," she said. "Caliban must have been planning this for years, decades. His hatred of the Manticore must be overwhelming. A small matter like his own slow death by starvation wouldn't have stopped him, but no, you're right."

  "I am? You're starting to convince me otherwise."

  "Caliban must be found, and brought to justice. He's dishonoured the division, hoarded lost technologies for his own gains. That's not what we do, Durham Red."

  "So you're up for getting out of here?"

  She stood up. "I am."

  "Good stuff. Now all we need to do is work out how."

  Ascension was a bright disc on the stellar cartography screen, bracketed by indicator icons and vector markers. In its path lay the edges of several circles, concentric rings drawn from threads of coloured light.

  Lydexia was bent over the screen, tracing the station path with a fingertip. "The discontinuity drive," she was saying, "threw us to this point. But once the drive was gone, so was the momentum. It didn't impart very much real speed to us at all."

  "Hmm. According to that, about five kilometres per second." Red gnawed a thumbnail. "So how far away are we?"

  "From the Manticore, no more than ten thousand kilometres."

  She did a swift mental calculation. "Sneck. Half an hour. No, wait, that's until we hit the Manticore! The bomb will go off before that."

  "Call it twenty-five minutes," said Lydexia. "How far away did you say your friends were?"

  "Too far." Red sidestepped to the next workstation and sat down, quickly sorting through its menus until she found a plan of the station. She was vaguely aware of Lydexia glaring at her, as if disgusted that a mutant could operate Iconoclast systems so easily, but Red ignored her. She'd become very good at learning how to use other people's computers as a matter of survival.

  The plan didn't look right until Red put her hand to the screen and covered half of it up. "Okay, this is us. How many people are left on the station, do you think?"

  "About fifty Custodes, maybe seventy scholars."

  "Helots?"

  "Blasphemy, helots aren't people."

  Red raised an eyebrow. "Caliban seemed to think differently."

  "Yes, but he's insane. Most of the helots would have died when the power failed. They're permanently linked into device drivers, because there's so little left of their original brains they can't keep their organs functioning."

  "Now that's just snecking sick." Red grimaced. "Can't you use robots or something?"

  Lydexia looked at her as though she was mad. "Robots? Monster, even if such a thing were possible, who would want a mechanical person lumbering around? That would be horrible."

  Red stared at her for a second or two, and then shook her head. There wasn't time. "So how many might be left ticking?"

  "Another fifty."

  "Right, that's two hundred and twenty people, plus you and me." She peered at the deck plan. "Tullus didn't berth his shuttle on the docking ring, that's obvious. So where did he put it? There's got to be a hangar deck somewhere."

  Lydexia shrugged. "I never saw such a place. Then again, there was plenty Caliban didn't show me." She held out her hand. "Give me the comm-linker."

  Red passed it to her. "Please would be nice."

  "I'm sure." The Archaeotech tapped out a crypt-key and pressed the "connect" icon. "Hirundo?"

  There was a few seconds of static, then: "Who's this? Identify yourself."

  Red moved away. There was no video on the linker, not with the signal pulsed so brutally, but she felt better being out of range anyway. It was one thing for an uneasy truce to develop between her and Lydexia in these desperate hours, but quite another for anyone else on the station to see it that way.

  Especially Hirundo, whom she had already shot once today.

  Lydexia saw what she was doing, and nodded fractionally. She understood. "Surely you recognise my voice?"

  "Doctor-captain?" Red could hear the sudden smile in his voice. "In God's name, I never thought to hear you again! The comms have been down since that impact, most of the hatches are jammed shut... Where are you?"

  "Still in the lab module. Hirundo, I don't have time to explain everything, but there has been a catastrophe, and we are in mortal danger. Ascension has to be evacuated."

  "Very well." Ever the good soldier, Red noted. He hadn't questioned her words for a moment. "I'll start moving people down to the docking ring - the other Custodes will follow my lead. How long do we have?"

  Lydexia made a face. "That's the problem. There is no docking ring."

  "I'm not sure I understand."

  "Hirundo, there has been an explosion. The docking ring is gone, as is the reactor. And everyone still on this station will die in roughly twenty minutes."

  "Ah," he said. "In which case, we may have a problem."

  "Tell me about it," muttered Red, well out of audio range, but drawing an angry glare from Lydexia anyway.

  "Hirundo, listen to me. General Caliban has already left the station. He used the Prefect's shuttle, and that must have been berthed somewhere above the spindle. Ask the local Custodes, if you can find any. I'll start making my way up. Where are you now?"

  "Upper hab deck. Godspeed, doctor-captain."

  Lydexia cut the connection and handed the linker back. "We need to leave, but if anyone sees you, monster, there will be even greater panic."

  "Not to mention people trying to kill me, and I don't even want to go into what will happen to you if we're seen together."

  "That's true."

  "Go on ahead. I'll make my own way."

  Lydexia shook her head. "No, wait..." She frowned for a moment, lost in thought, then beckoned Red to follow her out of the hatch. "You'll need a robe. Mine is on the other side of that debris, but there were those two corpses by the lift."

  "Them? You're kidding." She followed the Archaeotech round to the elevator doors. The two bodies lay where they had been flung, blood drying on the cracked tiles beneath them.

  One of the robes was in a better state than the other, but it still made Red look as though she had been hit by a truck. "It will give you an excuse not to talk," Lydexia told her, not without some satisfaction. "After all, you don't want anyone seeing those teeth of yours, do you?"

  By the time they got up to the habitation deck, the Custodes had managed to force some of the hatches open, and Archaeotechs filled the corridors. Red followed Lydexia through the crowds, keeping her head low, trying not to listen to the sounds c
oming from the compartments no one could open.

  For all Caliban's contrition about the fate of Ascension's occupants, the jamming of the hatches must have been part of his design, just like the blocking of the comms signal. The safety locks had been bypassed somehow. He had done quite a lot, Red realised, to make sure there would be no witnesses to his crimes.

  It looked as though her estimate of two hundred plus escapees would have to be hugely reduced.

  Lydexia took Red's linker again on the way, to make contact with Hirundo. The two met each other on the uppermost habitation deck.

  Red hung back as Hirundo embraced the Archaeotech, noting that Lydexia, after an initial flinch, seemed to rather warm to the idea. "I swore I'd find you," he was telling her. "After we lost sight of the Blasphemy, and there was no answer to my calls, I feared the worst."

  "I never doubted you would," she smiled.

  He glanced over at Red. "And your companion?"

  "I don't know her name." The woman's fingers were moving nervously, knotting and tapping. "She suffered injuries in one of the laboratory modules, and she can't speak. She helped me escape."

  "Then I'm in your debt, my lady." He gave Red a bow, and she waved back.

  Lydexia was looking around at the Archaeotechs and Custodes hurrying past them. There didn't seem to be all that many anymore as the crowd began to thin. "Did you discover Caliban's escape route?"

  "Only just. There's a shuttle deck just below the sensorium, but it had been sealed for years." He started off down the corridor, and Red and Lydexia followed. "As far as anyone knew it had been filled with insulating foam long ago. The hierophant would never have allowed ships to berth so close to his precious sensors."

  "I can only assume it wasn't as abandoned as everyone thought."

  The trooper shook his head, the breathe-mask dangling at his throat. "I led a team in, and we discovered otherwise. There are also a number of life-shells stationed there, refurbished and set for launch. If this is all Caliban's doing, then he must have been planning his escape for some time."

  "I've no doubt of that."

  Red had noticed that Lydexia still hadn't told Hirundo what the true nature of their danger was, or even what had caused the explosion. Then again, there were some things probably best not explained in the middle of an exodus, if panic was to be avoided. If any of the fleeing Iconoclasts around them were to discover just how close they were to the feared Manticore, anything could happen.

  By Red's calculations, they had less than ten minutes before it would be too late to care.

  It took at least half that time to get to the shuttle deck. There were stairs that led from one habitation level to another, but to go further than that required the use of either elevators or the emergency access ladders alongside them. And Caliban had jammed the lifts, too.

  Even Red was puffing by the time she had climbed up onto the shuttle deck.

  Hirundo was by the hatch, helping the last few stragglers through. As he grabbed Red's hand and pulled her up the last few rungs their eyes met, and for an awful second she was sure that he had recognised her. But he said nothing, simply stepped aside and let her go through the hatchway.

  The deck was long and curved, taking up at least a third of the station's circumference. The outer wall of it was studded with circular bulkheads, many of them sealed, and in front of a much larger set of double doors squatted the boxy, unlovely bulk of an Iconoclast shuttle, its drives glowing. Red saw Hirundo, who had now moved ahead of her, bend to say something to Lydexia, but with Archaeotechs still scrambling past her she couldn't hear what it was.

  She began to trot forward. In front of her, one of the circular bulkheads blinked closed, and there was a hefty thump of explosive latches from beyond. The deck shook, and pieces of metal broke free from the bulkhead's frame and skittered across the deck.

  On her far right, another life-shell exited in the same way. Red looked about to see if there were any others she could get into, but it looked as though she had just watched the last of them blast free from Ascension.

  The shuttle it had to be, then. She started forward.

  Hirundo snapped around to face her, his bolter centred unerringly on her sternum.

  "I'm sorry." He reached down to his breathe-mask with his free hand, and pulled it up over his face. "You saved her, and for that I'm grateful, but I can't let you leave this place."

  Red tensed slightly, preparing to leap. She wondered if she had left it too long, if he was too far away. Still, she'd have to risk it. "How long have you known?"

  "She told me when I first saw her. Silently."

  Battlesign, Red thought despairingly. The system of hand signals and finger movements Iconoclasts used as silent communications in combat. She'd seen Godolkin trying to teach Harrow the trick of it, but had never taken much notice. "Bugger."

  Lydexia was on the shuttle's ramp. "Goodbye, Blasphemy," she said, and then smiled. "No more nightmares."

  And with that, Hirundo pulled his trigger.

  Her attention had been on the Archaeotech. Red saw the bolter flare and twisted away, the staking pin ripping a slice through her upper arm. She rolled, ducking into cover behind one of the shuttle's landing claws, hearing the bolter blast-firing more stakes in her direction. They hammered into the deck plating, shredding the metal and sending splinters up in a fountain.

  Red sprinted around the shuttle's nose, just in time to see the ramp hingeing up.

  "Snecking bastards," she screamed, picking up a stray staking pin and waving at the vessel. "I'll get you for this!"

  The double doors were opening, the shuttle sliding forwards on a railed launch platform. Red thought for a second about running after it, somehow getting into the airlock with it and ripping her way in, but the only thing she would get out of that would be incinerated.

  There was no one else on the deck. Hirundo had managed, without her even noticing, to manoeuvre her right to the back of the queue.

  She stood where she was for a few seconds, then stripped off the bloodied robes and dropped them onto the floor. She'd not even had time to draw the magnum out. It had been hidden under the heavy fabric.

  Had that been part of Lydexia's plan, too?

  If her sense of time was anything close to right, Red had about three minutes before detonation, and that didn't leave much time to stand around wondering. Instead she turned and raced back to the hatch.

  It was a lot faster going down the ladders than up them, although running past compartments that were still plainly occupied was harder than she liked to admit. Adrenaline gave her speed and she had almost reached the access lock by the time the temporal bomb went off.

  She felt it through the deck, a twisting shudder somewhere beneath her as she keyed the hatch open and tugged the vacuum shroud from its hiding place. The staking pin, she realised, was still in her hand, and the particle magnum was on her belt. She swapped them over, then pulled the shroud open and started shoving her feet into the integral boots.

  There was a breeze behind her, cold and strange.

  It was hard not to panic, to rush and get herself tangled. By the time she had gotten the shroud around her waist, the temperature in the lock had dropped perceptibly, and it was getting darker. More drain on the power system, she thought, glancing back over her shoulder.

  She was wrong about that. The end of the corridor was wreathed in shadow.

  Red swore explosively and dropped the magnum, pulling the shroud up and around her. The helmet seal jammed for an awful second, and she had to fight the urge simply to pull it free. With her strength, she could quite easily rip the shroud apart.

  By the time she was in, the darkness was only fifty metres behind her, and accelerating.

  There was a sound, as well as the rising wind and failing light, a sinister rushing. Red grabbed the magnum with fat, gloved fingers and stumbled a few paces away from the lock. That took her closer to the onrushing darkness, and that awful, sibilant hissing. There were whisp
ers in it, she realised. Voices, high and quiet, like mad children breathing threats in a language she couldn't quite understand.

  Red raised the magnum, set it to full yield and held the trigger down.

  Energy snarled out of the gun and slammed into the inside of the airlock. The first bolts screamed and bounced inside, shattering cables and rupturing high-pressure pipes. Instantly the lock filled with vapour and sparks, and alarm gongs began chiming discordantly. They drowned out the whispering somewhat, which was a blessing.

  She fired again, and this time the hatch gave way.

  There was one instant between the first hole appearing in the metal, and the hatch failing entirely. Red saw the smoke suddenly cave in on itself, dragging the centre of the cloud back into the lock, and then the whole panel was off and tumbling away into space. A tornado of escaping air thundered after it.

  It picked Red up and bowled her through the hatch, the shroud ballooning.

  She was tumbling, whirling through space. Ascension was rolling around her, one second in her vision, the next at her back. She fumbled for the thruster pack's wrist controls, half wondering where her gun had flown off to. She'd lost her grip on it when the hatch had failed.

  The "stabilise" control was large on the wrist pad. Red found it by touch alone and pressed it hard. Immediately the thruster pack began jumping and bouncing behind her, sending out timed bursts to slow her spin in each axis. Within seconds she was feeling heartily sick, but at least she was looking at a steady view through the shroud's faceplate.

  Ascension was below her and to the right. She could see the ragged end of the spindle, and shattered fragments of the shield. And beyond it, a bright flare of thrusters, racing away as Hirundo and Lydexia escaped the coming storm.

  Darkness was growing from the heart of the station.

  The shadows she had seen in the corridor were spreading outwards, not increasing in size so much as building new layers of themselves, planes and spires of translucent shade - interweaving, linking and sliding over and through each other. It was like the way the time engine moved, seemingly passing through its own structure as it rotated, but that was a device, a construction of alien metals and electricity. This was something far greater, far more powerful. The time engine was a firecracker, this was the atom bomb.