Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  Red tapped the controls, turning herself away from the sight, and hit the emergency burn. The pack slammed into her back as its main thruster fired, powering her away from the oncoming shadows, but she could already see them spreading past and around her. It was too late.

  It had always been too late.

  The pack ran out of fuel, its last stutters setting her spinning again, very slowly. She was moving fast now, Ascension dropping away from her, but the shadow-planes were racing up to meet her now. She had seconds, if that, before they took her.

  She wondered if it would hurt.

  As the thought crossed her mind, light crossed her vision. Searingly bright against the shadows, a thin, pure track of blinding light tearing out of the darkness and striking Ascension between the dish and the lab modules. Red saw it hit, saw the way it boiled through the temporal bomb's shadows.

  She saw the star appear where it touched.

  A sphere of pure white glare, utterly perfect and unmarred, had been born where the beam had touched the station's surface. It was expanding, much faster than the shadows had risen from their heart of darkness, swamping the planes and the spires. They were contracting in on themselves as the light grew, like the limbs of a burning insect.

  The light rose up and out, world sized, its edges almost brushing at Red's booted feet. She looked down, leaning over in the shroud, and saw her own boots outlined against it, as though she was standing on a planet made of white light.

  Without warning, the sphere vanished, leaving her vision full of stars, her eyes full of tears.

  "Sneck me," she breathed, blinking furiously to try to stop the stinging. "What the bloody hell was that?"

  Moments later, she had her answer.

  It was a dot at the corner of her tear filled eye, and then it was a massive globe filling her vision. It had appeared so fast, stopped so quickly and so smoothly, that Red knew it could only have been driven by one force. The force that had torn Ascension in two and sent it hurtling clean through the Bastion's defences. A discontinuity drive.

  Except that this one worked. This was the original.

  The Manticore had arrived.

  15. DEATH AND REBIRTH

  In the Year of the Accord six hundred and twenty-seven, when Captain Verax and his fleet were destroyed in orbit around Kentyris Secundus, several of the ships involved had managed to send sense-engine data back to High Command before the Manticore's beams found them. The information had been classified upon arrival, but numerous security breakdowns in the decades that followed had brought the data closer to the surface. Red had managed to access some of it while she had been researching Ascension.

  The images she had seen there had been difficult to interpret. At times the attacker seemed to be a great circle of orange light, at others a dark crescent against the stars. It was either polished smooth or insanely detailed. Eventually, after trying to make sense of the pictures for several minutes, Red had given up, coming to the conclusion that someone in the fleet had been taking photographs with their thumb over the lens.

  Up close, though, the Manticore was a nightmare.

  Red had seldom been so close to anything as big. She would have thought that the clarity of the vacuum and the lack of any background light source would have made it difficult to gauge the object's scale, but she would have been wrong. The insane mass of the thing was impossible to mistake. It had to be at least fifty kilometres across, and the glowing crater that it had turned towards her must have been twenty from side to side.

  It knew she was there; she had no doubt about that. The Manticore's discontinuity jump had been executed perfectly, terminating within walking distance of where Red floated. It had matched her speed, her slow spin.

  It was looking at her.

  With the great, glassed in crater pointed at her like that, she couldn't help but see the Manticore as a giant metal eyeball.

  The centre of the crater was almost featureless, marred only by faint gridlines that were probably the size of roads. Towards its edge it began to rise up into layers, growing more complex the further Red looked from the centre. Around the rim of the lens, and indeed over the rest of the object's surface, it swarmed with detail.

  Red couldn't tell why, but it gave her the impression of something built slowly, over time, layer upon armoured layer. There was nothing in the Manticore's movement or form that spoke to her of anything but solidity. This thing was heavy metal, all the way down to the core.

  There was a comm-linker built into the vacuum shroud, crypt-keyed back to Omega Fury. Red tried it, pressing the send key on the wrist controls. "Guys? Can you see this?"

  Without Ascension to reroute and block the signal, Godolkin's voice came through very loud and sharp in her headset. "Blasphemy, we are still some distance from you. We were delayed breaching the Bastion's defences."

  "Are you okay?"

  "To a degree. Blasphemy, we have picked up an energy signature very close to your position." The shroud had a beacon built into the jump-pack. The things were mainly used for emergencies, anyway. "Has Ascension begun emitting power?"

  "Ascension's gone," she said quietly. "And the Manticore's here."

  Godolkin didn't say anything for a few moments, but she could hear Harrow shouting in the background. After a time the Iconoclast spoke again. "Hold your position, Mistress. We are accelerating."

  "No!" She twisted in the shroud, reflexively turning to try to see Fury's approach. It was a useless gesture, since the ship would be millions of kilometres away and still have the shadow web engaged, if they had any sense. "Keep away! If you get closer than a thousand clicks to this thing it'll cook you."

  "Blasphemy-"

  "I mean it, buster. It's come right up to me and not done anything yet, but I'll bet my saucy arse you won't get the same treatment. Stay a good distance away unless I tell you otherwise."

  "Thy will be done."

  "Maybe it won't do anything," she said hopefully, trying to work out how far the Manticore must have been from Ascension when it had fired. A lot further than a thousand kilometres, that was for sure. "It hasn't yet. It's just sitting there."

  "Perhaps it finds you interesting."

  "Right now, I'd rather it didn't." Her eyes scanned its seething surface, and once again the scale of it overwhelmed her. It gave her vertigo. "Christ, this thing is big. Godolkin-" She stopped in mid-sentence. "No, wait. Something's happening."

  "What? Mistress, what is it doing?"

  Red didn't answer. The Manticore was rolling.

  It had started to move, very slowly, the eye crater tipping forwards as the entire structure turned on some invisible axis. It rolled through ninety degrees, and then slowed again. Red, despite the complete lack of gravity, got the distinct impression that she was now above it.

  And it was rising towards her.

  She could hear Godolkin's voice, but dimly, as if a gnat was in the shroud with her. His words became a buzz, thinning and attenuating until they were gone altogether, and she drifted in silence.

  The surface of the Manticore was very close now.

  Directly in front of her, part of the object grew a star. A point of light, pale and vaguely blue, appeared amidst the panelling, and swiftly began to spread out into several long, converging lines. The lines were thin at first, hair-fine to her eyes, but they expanded rapidly.

  A circular door was opening up for her, dozens of metal segments hingeing up and out, each one dozens of metres long. The light expanded into a disc of cool, blue radiance, flooding out, enveloping her, and slowly drawing her down.

  When the light faded, she was within the belly of the beast.

  There was gravity here, she realised, sitting up, and, judging by the way the vacuum shroud now hung around her like a deflated balloon, air. Or at least pressure. Red had no intention of cracking the seal just yet.

  She got up and looked around her, watching as the light receded into the walls, revealing the detail of her surroundings. High above her
another set of segments was drawing closed, sealing her in. She must have travelled down a tube from the first opening.

  An airlock of sorts, built to a massive scale. The chamber Red stood in now was a hollow sphere so big that Fury could have flown around the inside of it with ease.

  The walls were as detailed as the outside surface of the Manticore, multilayered, panel upon irregular panel, with blue light flooding out from the gaps. Dark nodules, very glossy, studded the interior of the sphere as far as she could see, some the size of her torso, others as big as a shuttlecraft, and every size in between. They looked like some kind of bizarre metallic fungi, growing out of the wall in their thousands.

  "Weird," Red breathed. "Totally snecking weird."

  There was a noise in the chamber; not loud, but pervasive. It was a kind of immensely long, drawn out groan, a humming intake of air, rising slightly in pitch. As Red listened it rose higher, higher still, then stopped with a sudden, forceful impact. Something, far away, had slammed closed.

  The sound began again, this time decreasing in pitch, moaning down the scale. After a minute or two it stopped as well, but this time it just faded away. And then returned, and started to rise.

  Manticore was breathing.

  The sound gave Red the shivers. It ground into her bones, her soul. As long as she was inside this monster, she would never escape the sound of its breath. That, alone, was reason enough to escape.

  But in order to do that, she needed to know exactly what it was she was escaping from.

  She moved closer to one of the nodules, one about the size of a small groundcar, and tapped it with her boot. It felt solid, heavy, fixed firmly onto the panels below. Quite dull. Red lost interest and began to move away.

  Behind her something rattled and clicked, followed by a quick succession of thin mechanical noises. She turned around.

  The nodule had grown legs.

  Red shouted in horror and backed away, fingers scrabbling at her waist for a gun that wasn't there. The nodule had extended six long, slender limbs, each ten times the length of its own body, and hauled itself up off the ground. The body rotated backwards, bringing an asymmetrical cluster of eye-lenses up to glare at her, and a set of hinged arms unfolded from below it to snap at the air. There were instruments at the ends of those arms, and they glittered.

  The machine took a step towards her, one long leg rising up, high above her head, the claw-tipped foot coming down onto the panelling at her side.

  Red had never been all that fond of spiders, especially when they were bigger than she was.

  She looked around, trying to find an escape route, a weapon, anything to put between her and this awful construction, but all she saw were more nodules coming to life. Everywhere she looked they were rising up from the inside of the sphere - from behind her, from above, to every side. The inside of the chamber was suddenly a sea of gleaming, chattering metallic motion, of glassy eye-lenses and snipping claws.

  Some of the machines were low and stubby, their legs no longer than hers, making them look like bloated ticks the size of gel-beds. Others were all leg, dancing their way towards her with their tiny bodies bobbing. Smaller constructions were forcing their way up through the floor, the walls, scuttling things no bigger than her hand.

  The entire chamber was alive.

  One of the machines darted at her, and its grasping limbs snapped out faster than she could follow. It grabbed the shoulder of the vacuum shroud, shook her violently and then shoved her backwards. Another grabbed her before she could fall; a third reached in with horrible, snakelike tendrils flailing.

  Red screamed in rage and kicked out, sending a gleaming limb flying from its moorings, but another ten instantly took its place. Within moments they were plucking at the seals of her suit, finding the connectors and the fastenings. Red felt a tugging, an insistent pressure, and cold air suddenly rushed into the shroud as one of them flipped the helmet back.

  Red twisted away and dropped into a fighting crouch, bringing her fists up despite the weight of the shroud-fabric. "Come on then, you spidery bastards, I've had bigger than you! All at once or one at a time, I'm not bothered- Hey!"

  One of the machines, a fat tick with twenty or thirty eye-lenses all whirring in unison, had grabbed her from behind. Its limbs were solid and powerful, fed by thick hydraulic hoses and coiled power lines, and once it had her there was no breaking its grip. It took her by the shoulders and hoisted her a metre off the ground.

  Red writhed and snarled, but to no avail. The machine was far, far too strong.

  It began to walk.

  Ahead of it, Red saw the others begin to move aside. With their long limbs clicking, their pincers nipping in razored lust, they parted in front of her like a biblical ocean. As the tick holding her started to pick up its pace, Red saw that she had a clear path through the army of metal bugs and out the other side.

  Long triangular panels were folding aside, spilling light from between them. It was another door, opening in her path.

  The machines obviously had plans for her. Unable to break free, and held aloft like a prize, Red could only hang in the air and watch the door gaping to swallow her.

  If Red had thought she had known nightmares before she entered that circular opening, she was about to be proved wrong.

  The door led directly onto a tunnel, a wide tube five or six metres across. Its sides were rippling with spider-machines, shining black and smooth against the paler panelling of the tunnel walls, while larger constructions marched around her in every direction. Most ignored her, the smaller ones not even moving out of the way before the tick's heavy limbs crushed them, but the bigger bugs seemed more interested. More than one got in her captor's way, eager to nip at her skin or pull her hair with their grippers. To escape, the tick would often simply scuttle up a wall, or walk along the tunnel's ceiling for a time. An effective enough tactic, but one that frequently left Red dangling completely upside down.

  All the time that she was being flung about like this, the cold air rang with the moaning rise and fall of the Manticore's breath.

  After several minutes of this treatment, the terrain changed. Openings appeared in the tunnel walls, smaller tubes leading away. Some of them were quite short, little more than cylindrical antechambers leading to larger spherical rooms. As the tick passed by one it slowed, and Red was able to glimpse what lay inside.

  It was a mistake, looking, and one that she would regret for a long time.

  The room's outer edges were covered in mechanical arms, larger and more complex cousins to that holding her shoulders now. The arms were still, some plainly broken or rusted into place, but the work they had once carried out was very much in evidence. For on a circle of tables in the centre of the room, held down with thick metal straps, lay dried, papery things that had once been men and women.

  The floor was littered with rot and small bones that had tumbled from their desiccating owners as their skins had shrunk away. Many of the bodies had chest cavities that gaped like grasping hands, ribs teased apart to clutch at the air, and the brown, leathery bags that had once pumped and breathed within them had been extracted for view. These people, Red could see, had been dissected.

  That would have been nightmare enough, had not the hand of one male corpse been outstretched and still clasping that of the woman next to him.

  They had been alive when the arms had opened them up. Alive and conscious.

  Red turned her head away, and was thankful when the tick moved again.

  There was another chamber at the end of the tunnel, large and flattened, built from the same panelled metal as everything else here. The tick moved into the centre of it, then paused. At some invisible, inaudible signal it began to turn around on its clawed, stumpy legs, as if it was showing Red where it had taken her.

  The arms holding her squeezed, painfully, and shook her. Red kicked and squirmed, but kept her silence, refusing to give the machine the satisfaction of a cry. Besides, she had other things on
her mind.

  She couldn't help but stare at what lay around her. Where the corpse chambers had been a nightmare, this was simply surreal. There was nothing here to make sense of.

  In the centre of the room, on a wide disc of polished brass, was a squat cylinder the size of her torso. It was cast from what could only have been solid gold, and burnished to a high shine, while ranged around it was a wide ring of small, square boxes, each about the size of her head and raised on a pillar of grimy hoses and corroded steel cables.

  In contrast to the cylinder, the boxes were roughly welded together from black metal.

  There was something pale on the inside face of each box. Red couldn't see what it was at first, so she leaned closer. Obediently, the tick scuttled forwards, bringing her within a metre of the nearest. Easily close enough to see what had been stretched across its face.

  Red recoiled. It was skin.

  The front of each box was cut with a square hole, and the space inside the remaining frame filled with smooth, pale skin. And in the centre of the box was a mouth.

  There was no chin, no other features at all, just a set of faintly-parted lips, the hint of teeth behind them. Red glanced across to the next box, and saw that it bore not a mouth, but a closed eye. Further along, an ear.

  Eyes, ears, mouths, separated from the faces that once bore them and set into these awful containers, disembodied senses all facing that golden cylinder. Red squeezed her eyes shut. "Why are you showing me this?" she grated, struggling. "What are you doing to me?"

  "Help me!"

  The voice was high, startlingly loud. Red's eyes snapped open.

  The mouth was screaming at her. "Help me!" it shrieked. "God, help me!"

  Next to it, the eye had opened, and was rolling frantically.