Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  More mouths were opening. Red heard laughter, pleading, threats. The mouths howled and shrieked at her, begged and pleaded, drooled and spat and gibbered. Instantly the room was filled with voices, their cacophony beating at her ears. She tried to draw away, but the tick seemed to sense her distress. Cruelly, it held her closer to the mouth, forcing her lips close to those working in that sheet of skin.

  The eye was looking right at her. They all were. The mouth's spittle was on her cheek.

  Suddenly, the tick jerked her back, spun on its claws and hurried away across the dais, so quickly that it knocked the golden cylinder askew. If that was somehow important to the machine, it made no sign, just continued on its path across the disc and out of the circular opening in the chamber's far side.

  The voices went on screaming long after Red had left them. She could hear them behind her, their pleas a chorus of pain.

  One last tunnel. One last chamber.

  The tick scuttled into a spherical room at the end of the tube and dropped Red unceremoniously onto the floor. She hadn't been expecting that, and came down hard, rolling to a halt among cables and rough metal plates. By the time she had found her balance on the uneven surface and risen to her feet, the machine had already retreated. She caught one last glimpse of its glossy back as the chamber's door closed, spears of metal extending through the walls to form a disc in front of her, sealing her in.

  She turned, slowly. There were no corpses here, no nightmare of disembodied eyes and mouths. Half the chamber was bare metal plate. The other half, or more than half, was made up of screens.

  Red took a few steps forward and reached out to touch one. It was a flat glass panel, slightly warm, its surface matte and gridded. It looked very much like the displays on an Iconoclast workstation.

  That was the last thing Red had expected to see. She stepped back, startled, and as she did so the screen lit up.

  Something pale filled it, moving, its pixels swarming in grainy close-up.

  Red moved further back as more screens came on. One near the top showed a pattern of black and crimson lines. In the centre, a shallow depression in the pale surround. In another something white and wet.

  The rest of the screens flickered into life, and the picture they formed filled Red's view. She gasped.

  It was a face.

  Had it not been for one scarred, milky eye, and the maddened sneer on its lips, it would have been her face. And, given time, it might be again.

  "Well," said Brite Red, glaring down from a thousand video displays. "Here you are. I've been waiting such a long time for this..."

  16. FUTURE IMPERFECT

  "You're dead," Red gasped, pointing up at the divided face looming over her. "I killed you, and the Iconoclasts froze you."

  "Times change," said Brite.

  "You haven't," snarled Red. "Still the same megalomaniacal bitch I chewed up at Salecah."

  "Speak when you're spoken to," the face snapped, and pain blasted into Red's skull.

  She cried out, dropping to the floor, her hands clasped over her head as though the pressure of them would somehow keep the agony away. She had felt something like this, weeks ago, when Brite had tortured Harrow and Godolkin and focused their pain into her mind, to draw her to the artefact and their final confrontation. That had been a scratch compared to what she was feeling now.

  Just when Red thought that her brain was going to shatter in her head, the pain stopped. She slumped forwards, her hands twitching, her legs suddenly too weak to support her. She fell and rolled over onto her back.

  "Oh, that felt so good." Brite's face was in something close to ecstasy, her good eye rolled back. "I've waited a long, long time to do that to you. All that pain I've been storing up, just for you." She looked down at Red and grinned horribly. "You know, it's true what they say. The longer you go without, the better it is when you finally get some!"

  Blood was dripping from Red's nose. She wiped it away weakly and sat up. "So this is what it's all been about, eh? Getting me in here and snecking me over?"

  "Yes. Absolutely." The face leered. "After four hundred years I've finally caught up with you, and now I've got you exactly where I want you. And oh, I'm going to make the most of it."

  The pain slammed into Red again, but briefly this time. Just enough to make her cry out.

  "A free sample," Brite smiled.

  "Just enough to get you off again, huh?" Red forced herself upright. "I never realised I was into that."

  "Oh, that wit will be the death of you, Durham Red. Eventually." The face seemed to flicker, a line of static crawling up if from chin to hairline, and something near Red's left boot sparked.

  "Looks like this place isn't in such good repair, Brite. What did you do, fire the maintenance man?"

  "Fired, dissected, I forget. I've been here so long it all sort of blurs into one. Don't you find that?"

  "Not really."

  "You will."

  Red wandered over to one side of the chamber, flicking cables with her boot. She hoped the vacuum shroud was a good insulator. "Okay, Brite, spill the beans. Where did you find this thing?"

  "I didn't find it, you pathetic idiot. I built it."

  "Bullshit. Last time I saw you, I had half your blood in my belly and the rest was on the floor. How the sneck could you build a damn thing?"

  Pain lashed at her, and she staggered. "You rancid little slut!" Brite screamed the words, her image on the screens jumping. "I'll burn your mind out! You don't know what pain is!"

  "And you do?" Red had kept her feet this time. Either Brite's store of bottled agony was running dry, or she was getting used to it. "You wanted death, Brite! You begged me for it at Salecah - you built the artefact, the time engine, just so you could come back to kill me and wipe out your own past. All I did was give you what you wanted."

  "And it didn't work, did it?" On the screen, Brite's eyes closed, her scarred face twisting. "God, Durham, you don't know what it's like. You can't know. The things they did to me..."

  "Who?"

  "The Archaeotechs. The ones who were on Ascension when Caliban's bomb went off."

  Red blinked. "Wait a minute. You destroyed Ascension. How-"

  "I didn't destroy it. That's not a weapon you saw me use, it's a time-grab." Brite sounded tired suddenly. Exhausted. Just from the sound of her voice, Red had a momentary feeling of just how long this woman had been alive, in one form or another. The thought chilled her.

  "So Ascension went back a million years?"

  "It did. I wasn't exactly alert at the time, you understand. I've had to fill in the gaps. But yes, the bomb went off. I hit it with the time-grab to stop it taking the Manticore back as well. That wouldn't have been good."

  "You knew it was going to go off?"

  Brite sighed. "I was waiting for it to go off. I'd been waiting for almost two hundred years!"

  Red groaned and put her head in her hands. "Zap me again, will you? This is making my head hurt even worse than your bloody jolts."

  "You know, all the time I've spent waiting for this moment, knowing it was going to happen, I never thought I'd end up explaining myself to you. I thought you'd have been screaming non-stop by now." The image flickered again, as if Brite's changing moods were affecting the screens. "But it's been so long since I talked to anyone."

  "How long? Come on, Brite. You started this."

  Abruptly, the image roared with laughter. "Did I? Oh, that's wonderful! You know, I really have no idea if I did or not."

  "I didn't mean-"

  "I know what you meant." Brite's face moved closer on the screens, filling them with her gaze. "Listen to me, Durham Red, and I'll try to keep it simple. Caliban's bomb sent Ascension back a million years, with a hundred Archaeotechs still onboard. Do you know what the universe was like a million years ago?"

  "No."

  "Trust me, you don't want to. It was... occupied. I'll not speak of that again, and I didn't see much of it. But what I did see was enough." There wa
s a coldness in her voice now, a horror. "They had to escape. They would have done anything to get back to their own time."

  "Oh no..." Red gaped up at her. "They used the time engine, didn't they?"

  "They tried. Oh, they tried, for years. But they always failed, until they realised the one component that was missing. The one part it could never work without."

  "You?"

  "I was clever in my youth, wasn't I?" She smiled, fangs showing. "Yes, me. They'd forgotten about my body, frozen in the hazardous waste store all that time. But that was the missing factor. I'd designed the time engine to operate specifically under my control. Without me, it's nothing."

  Red closed her eyes. All her efforts in trying to destroy the thing had been in vain. She could have left it to the Iconoclasts, could have handed it to the Patriarch himself gift-wrapped, and without Brite Red it would have been no more use than just another bomb. "What did they do? Bring you back to life?"

  "Oh no, they weren't that stupid. They just used a little of my brain tissue, accessed a few core functions. I was still dead. To start with, anyway."

  "But we heal fast." Red thought about Brite's frozen brain, scraps of tissue being revived by the Archaeotechs to control the time engine, and all the time those scraps were growing, repairing themselves, reviving more and more of the surrounding neurons.

  Eventually, consciousness would have returned. Thoughts and dreams. Pain. Madness. But Brite would have been clever, would have kept her newfound talents to herself, until it was too late. One day, the Archaeotechs would have woken up to find Ascension no longer under their control, but under hers.

  And that would only have been the beginning. Red thought about the mummified bodies in the dissection chamber. Brite had taken them apart to see how they worked. "How long did it take? To kill them all?"

  "Kill them? My dear, most of them are still alive. In a manner of speaking."

  The mouths in their boxes, the eyes, weeping and screaming. "Sneck, Brite, you did that to them? Those cube-things?"

  "What, the chapel? Oh, that was just an experiment. But I got tired of being worshipped very quickly. I'd been a goddess before, and it wasn't much fun then."

  "I can imagine."

  Fire sliced into her head, tore down her spine. "No you can't! You can't even begin to imagine!"

  Red collapsed. She'd not been getting used to it at all. That burst had been short, but it was the worst yet.

  "I'm the closest thing to a goddess these people have ever seen," Brite was snarling. "I remade them in my own image! I built the Manticore around myself, with the materials I gathered after it was finished. I looped time itself around me, to supply me with what I needed." She stopped abruptly, her eyes flicking to one side. "There's something..."

  "What?"

  "Never mind. It's none of your concern."

  Red doubted that. And if she was right, she needed to keep Brite talking. "So those spiders out there are helots?"

  "Some of them. The smaller ones are just machines, but the choicest Archaeotechs ended up as hired help. There weren't enough, so I designed the time-grab to get more. The ships that attacked me when I reappeared - I grabbed them and sent them back a million years, to when I was building the Manticore out of Ascension's ruins. Everything I grabbed, I sent back as raw material. Ships, cities, people... It took a lot to make this. There was..." She frowned. "Wastage. Not everything could be used."

  Red's mind reeled. Even in that first battle, when Verax and his fleet had tried to defend Kentyris Secundus from the Manticore's beams, no ships had been destroyed. Those globes of white light she had seen in the classified images, and again consuming Ascension, were not death, but time. Brite had been building the Manticore out of men and machines that she sent back to the moment of its own birth.

  The time paradoxes it threw up made Harrow's hypothesis look like a child's puzzle. There were loops everywhere, separate time lines linking and diverging.

  "Oh my God. You built this whole thing, this entire bloody nightmare of a machine, just to come forward in time to the point where you could grab bits of spaceship and send them back in time to when you were building it in the first place?"

  "More or less," chuckled Brite. "I was hoping to just come back to Ascension directly. I remembered what happened, and I knew that I, or you, would be here at a certain time and a certain place. But you'd damaged the time engine with that stupid overload plan. I couldn't get any closer than six-twenty-seven..."

  Brite broke off, her eyes wide with shock.

  The screens went blank for a full second. When they returned, Brite's face was fractured, in totally the wrong order, like a badly solved jigsaw. It took another few seconds for her to rearrange herself. "What have you done?" she hissed down at Red.

  "Me? Why does everyone always blame me?"

  "Because it's always your fault!" Brite's eyes were flicking madly. "I don't remember this. This shouldn't be happening. Something's outside, there's damage..."

  "Really?" While Brite had been talking, she had pulled her right arm out of the shroud's sleeve, leaving it to dangle while she fished around on her belt. There, on the clip that had once held her magnum, was the only weapon she had left. Hirundo's staking pin. "What's the matter? Time-grab not working?"

  "There's nothing out there to grab! Your accursed starship is attacking me!"

  "And your time-weapons are line-of-sight, eh? That's useful."

  Brite's face snapped back towards her, hair flying. "I'll deal with you later, bitch. You've distracted me long enough."

  "Yeah? Actually, I'm just getting started!" Red flipped the pin out, caught it in her left hand, and slammed it down into the cabling.

  Sparks erupted, sheets of light bursting against the shroud's glove. Above her, Brite howled.

  Raw agony hit Red between the eyes, blinding her. She hauled the pin out again and stabbed back down into the cables, over and over, focussing all her rage and pain on that single action - stab, lift, stab again. It was like a mantra, an act of pointless violence that took her through the pain and out the other side.

  The agony dropped away, and Red turned to see the tick rearing behind her.

  Brite had told her too much. About the helots, the fate of the Archaeotechs, everything. Back at Salecah, Red had remarked that her future self had enjoyed the sound of her own voice. After all that Brite had been through - her revival at the hands of the Iconoclasts, her slow recovery to take over Ascension, the centuries she had spent building the Manticore to be both her weapon and the means of its own construction - she still did. All Red had needed to do was keep prompting, and Brite had spelled it all out.

  There was something alive inside the helots, or something that had been alive once. Red leapt at the tick and drove the staking pin into its glossy body between its myriad eyes.

  It shrieked.

  The forward section of its carapace splintered, the needle sharp tip of the staking pin punching through the shell and into the systems behind. Red dragged the weapon free, and as she did so caught a glimpse of something pallid and fleshy through the hole she had left. The pin came out wet.

  She drew back, ready for another blow, but the tick was scuttling madly on the spot, its limbs flailing.

  Red darted past it, already knowing where to go. She ran back through the tunnel, avoiding another pair of helot-spiders that crashed through the wall plating to either side of her, and raced down into what Brite had called the chapel. The place where she was worshipped by the disembodied mouths and eyes of the Archaeotechs.

  Machines, huge and clawed, were barrelling in from the opposite tunnel.

  She jumped up onto the disc, rolling under a leg, feeling the knives at the end of it part the air millimetres from her face, and kicked hard at the golden cylinder. It had already been knocked askew by the tick on its hurried way into the screen chamber. Brite herself must have ordered the helot to hurry, and in its terror it had done half of Red's job for her.

  The cyli
nder cracked free of its moorings. Ancient and ill-maintained, the metal sheered off at the base, bolts flying. Red grabbed it and shoved it back, off the disc and away.

  Beneath her golden cover, the true remnants of Brite Red lay bare.

  The Archaeotechs had put her in a small nutrient tank. Too small for all of her: only her head remained, her face against the glass, tongue grey and lolling. Her hair was gone, the scalp and skull beneath it gone too. The grey mass of her brain was a forest of implanted tubes.

  "I should have done this a long time ago," Red breathed, raising the staking pin high. "I'm sorry."

  She slammed the pin down, as hard as she could, through the glass and into the heart of Brite Red's tortured mind.

  The Manticore took a long time to die, far longer than Brite did. Red could tell that her future self was finally at peace when the spider-helots around her stopped in their tracks and slowly began to fold themselves away.

  Red went back into the screen room, and was rather surprised to see Brite's face still looming there.

  It was a mere sketch of itself, and growing simpler as she watched. The eyes no longer moved; the hair was just a vague smear of scarlet and black.

  "Dying," it said.

  "I'm not surprised." She had discarded the staking pin, left it buried in the shattered pulp of Brite's brain. "Isn't that what you wanted?"

  "It is, I think. I can feel parts of me shutting down, one by one. My mind is in the Manticore, but only traces. I'm fading, and it feels..."

  "What?"

  "It feels like peace."

  Red sighed. She felt no triumph, here at the end. All she could bring herself to feel was a kind of belated satisfaction. Brite Red should have died for good at Salecah, but she had been forced to endure hundreds of years more at the hands of the stranded Archaeotechs. If it was finally over for her, the end had not come nearly soon enough.

  "Red?"

  "Yeah?"

  "I have to tell you something. Something about your future."

  Red violently shook her head. "Oh no! I don't want to know. Anyway, our time lines must have diverged sometime back then. You didn't remember me doing this, did you?"