Black Dawn

by Peter J Evans

  Enough for Godolkin to see one of those hills move.

  The entire, jagged pile shifted, twisting sideways a fraction of a degree, spilling tiles and stone slabs from its flank. Shattered masonry bounced past Godolkin, pebbles tapping at his boots. "Harrow," he said warily.

  "Yes."

  "We should not be here."

  As soon as he spoke, the comm-linker chirruped in his hand and lit up again. "Godolkin!"

  "Mistress?"

  "Get your arses back inside, now! There's something coming your way, and it's bloody huge!"

  Godolkin needed no more details than that. If what the Blasphemy had seen managed to catch up with him, he would need more information on how to fight it, but he had no intention of letting it get that close.

  He turned, grabbed Harrow by the shoulder and swung the mutant round ahead of him, propelling him into the darkness. "Go!" he snarled.

  Harrow was no fool. He went.

  Godolkin saw him racing away; first a man, then a flat shadow in the powdery air, then a moving glow. Godolkin watched the light, judging how fast it moved, its range from Omega Fury, the likely amount of debris blocking its path. He calculated how long it would take Harrow to reach safety before the threat overtook him.

  He might make it, but it would be close. Still, the man had a head start now, enough not to get in Godolkin's way.

  The Iconoclast put his head down and ran.

  He was a big man, tall and powerfully muscled, not slim and lithe like Harrow. However, his body probably had less in common with a normal human's than the mutant running ahead of him. He had been augmented, reworked, subjected to processes and training that had come as close to killing him as it had to remaking him. Every bone, every nerve and muscle, every organ had been either honed, or refined, or simply taken away and replaced with something better, until Matteus Godolkin the human being had ceased to be.

  Matteus Godolkin the Iconoclast, elite soldier of the Pan-Species Accord, hammered across the debris fields like a particularly fast and brutal machine.

  The wind was rising as he ran, the forward edges of it whipping the ash into ragged spirals. He began to feel tiny impacts against his skin, slivers of debris picked up from the surrounding hills and sent tumbling into his path. The wreckage of Sirion was moaning on either side, giving forth creaking complaints as it was shunted about.

  There was light ahead of him, now, the steady glare of Omega Fury and the jolting spark of Harrow's hand-lume. To his right, the wind's lament had increased to a shriek of raw anger, and Godolkin could hear the litter it carried crashing against the hills. Pieces of stone were already spinning past him, moving as fast as if picked up by mortal hands and thrown. One of them struck the side of his head, hard enough to set him stumbling for a second, and while he was off-balance another slammed into his hand-lume, shattering the lens.

  The light died instantly. With a snarl of rage Godolkin flung the lume away, dropped his head and charged through the storm like a bull.

  He reached Omega Fury just as the stormfront did.

  Harrow was waiting at the airlock, holding it open for him. As he jumped inside, the mutant said something to him, but there was so much debris slamming against the ship that its racket drowned Harrow out. Whatever his words might have been, they were lost to the wind.

  Once the lock was closed, the noise ceased, its absence sudden and jolting. Godolkin's ears were ringing, and when he shook his head to try to clear them a cloud of dust rose from his hair. A sizeable amount of Sirion's ash was still coating him, despite the wind.

  There was a decontamination chamber on the ship's lowest deck, a transpex cylinder fitted with a high-pressure chemical shower. The chamber was standard issue on long-range vessels like Omega Fury, where the ship might need to act as a mobile support base for months on end, and was normally only used after excursions into highly poisonous or diseased landscapes. Sirion, for all its rotted foulness, was neither of those, but Godolkin went in anyway, fully-clothed, and let the cleansing chemicals scour him free of ash. He emerged steaming from the dryers, his skin itching fiercely, but at least he was rid of the ghastly stuff.

  As he went off to stow his wargear, he saw Judas Harrow gingerly stepping into the chamber after him.

  Durham Red was waiting for him at the entrance to the weapons store, leaning against the hatch with her arms folded. After the unremitting pallor of the planet's surface, seeing her standing there was almost a shock to his eyes. The leather outfit she wore was as black and glossy as the shell of a bug, her mane of hair a rich crimson against the whiteness of her skin. Since falling under her spell Matteus Godolkin had seen the Blasphemy countless times, but never before had the sight of her beat at him the way it did now.

  She made him want to squint, as though he were looking at the sun.

  "We should take off as soon as possible," he told her. "There are areas of the ship which could take damage if the storm increases."

  "Like what?"

  "The shadow web, for one."

  "Hmm." She shook her head. "Not just yet. There are some things I want to know first."

  "Such as?"

  "What you found out there." Her voice was quiet, but it held a dangerous edge. "The signal stopped just as I called you."

  "I told you. We found nothing," Godolkin replied.

  "Yeah, but I don't believe you." She straightened, moving away from the hatch. Godolkin took the opportunity to step past her and key it open.

  "Blasphemy, there was nothing to find. A scrap of broken machinery under a pile of bones." He took the derringer from his belt and unlocked the charge pack, stowing the weapon carefully in its rack. "If you continue to disbelieve me, I would suggest you go to the place yourself and look."

  "All I'm asking for is an answer."

  "And all I ask for is rest, Durham Red." He glanced around at her, a slender silhouette in the hatchway. "But we are both destined to be disappointed today. There are no answers on Sirion, and there is no rest to be found, either. The sooner we are back in space the better."

  "So we're giving up?"

  Godolkin hesitated before answering, but it seemed as though her question was simply that. She was asking his opinion, not commenting rhetorically. "Our time in the Gulf is not limitless, Blasphemy. I would hate to waste more of it here."

  She sighed. "Sneck," she muttered, "I really thought we'd find something on Sirion, you know? Even just a few survivors, anything..."

  "Blasphemy, I understand why you needed to study this world - the ash might have blocked our sense-engines, hidden some trace of a bio-sign from us. The radio signal was our best chance yet of finding survivors within the Gulf, but it came to nothing. Accept this, and move on." He turned away from her, and began to unbuckle his battle-harness.

  "Godolkin?"

  He froze. "Yes?"

  "These last couple of months have been, well, a bit weird. It's been tough on everyone."

  "We have survived."

  She chuckled softly. "Yeah... Look, I just wanted to make sure you were okay, that's all."

  Godolkin, hidden in the darkness of the weapon store, closed his eyes for a moment. The very fact that this creature might consider him capable of being "okay" was close to overwhelming. Did she know nothing?

  What would happen, he wondered suddenly, if she were to discover what was really going on inside Matteus Godolkin? If all his layers of Iconoclast stoicism and calm were flensed away, leaving the man beneath raw and glistening, what would Durham Red see?

  Exhaustion, perhaps; a tiredness that went all the way down to the bone and then deeper still, to the soul. Godolkin had not known rest since the vampire's teeth had found his throat on Wodan. An Iconoclast was trained to do without sleep for long periods, and Godolkin's level of physical enhancement was such that he could go for weeks without needing to rest. But he was a man cursed, his soul bound to that of the vampire, his will dominated by hers. Even in the quiet times, when he was alone and undisturbed, real
rest eluded him.

  What else? Despair, maybe. Horror, eating away at his heart. The desire to harm, the continual, driving need to see the Blasphemy broken at his feet, to rid the galaxy of her and her mutant filth forever. Rage. Remorse. Sorrow.

  All these things, and more. Down in the darkest places lurked feelings that Godolkin loathed to even admit existed, moments where his feelings towards the vampire differed from the certainty of anger, the cleansing rawness of hate. Times of weakness, of compliance, of compassion.

  If any of those feelings were to be allowed free reign, they would swamp him. So he forced them down, his mental training hammering them back into obscurity, where their heresies could not distract him. He opened his eyes.

  "Do not concern yourself, Blasphemy," he breathed, finally. "I am well."

  "Honestly?"

  "Yes."

  "Good," she whispered. "I just needed to know, before-" She stopped in mid-sentence. Godolkin heard her spin on her heel and walk quickly away.

  "Before what?" he asked quietly, but the question wasn't directed at the Blasphemy. She was already out of earshot.

  Durham Red decided not to leave Sirion straight away. Instead, she called her companions together for a conference.

  Judas Harrow met them in the refectory, his skin looking slightly raw from the decontamination sprays. There was a paler triangle about his nose and mouth, two white circles around his eyes. He'd kept the goggles and breath mask on while in the chamber, which was only sensible, but it had left him oddly piebald.

  Godolkin saw the look of amusement cross Durham Red's face as the man walked in, the fleeting quirk at the corner of her mouth. "Blimey, Jude! What have you been doing to yourself?"

  The mutant gave him a glare. "Forgive me, holy one. Godolkin's skin is obviously tougher than mine."

  "The discolouration will fade, Harrow." Godolkin sat back, sipping a beaker of water. Despite the protection of his own breath mask, Sirion's air had dried his throat. "Do not mourn your boyish good looks just yet."

  "Leave it out, you two." Red motioned Harrow towards a seat. "This is serious. Fury picked up another neutrino flare."

  That brought a sudden intake of breath from Harrow. Godolkin had slightly more control over his emotions than the younger man, but he felt the shock of it, all the same. "When?"

  "While you were out. That's what I was looking at when I let the sense-engines get away from me."

  "In what direction?" Harrow asked her.

  "Between us and the Periphery." Red scraped a hand back through her hair, a nervous gesture that Godolkin had begun noticing more and more lately. "I checked the ranges, and it must have happened about two weeks ago."

  Godolkin nodded silently to himself. A neutrino flare was a sure sign of combat, and usually of a starship's destruction. A power core losing control of its own containment field would quite often go nova, unleashing its energies in an explosion that could, in the case of very large vessels, rival the energies of a minor sun.

  The flood of neutrinos released would travel outwards at lightspeed. So the explosion Red had witnessed had taken place roughly fourteen light-days away. In other words, on the edge of the Manticore Gulf.

  "The Bastion," he said. "It remains?"

  The Blasphemy nodded. "Looks like another batch of Ascension survivors tried to jump through. I'm guessing it wasn't Caliban, or that bitch Lydexia, but I can always dream." She sighed, leaning forwards to rest her chin in her cupped hands, elbows on the table. "End result is, the Bastion hasn't disbanded yet. We're still trapped."

  The refectory seats were clamped magnetically the deck, only moveable when a concealed handle was squeezed. Harrow pulled one closer and sat down. "Holy one, we can't stay here for much longer. Sirion was our best chance of finding survivors, and all we discovered was ash and bone. There has to be a way out of the Bastion."

  "Are you kidding?" Durham Red blinked at him. "I've been trying to chart where those vortex relays have been stationed, and you know what? I've given up."

  "They are difficult to detect," Harrow ventured, but she was already shaking her head.

  "That's just it. They aren't. The problem is that there's too snecking many of them."

  That was no surprise to Godolkin. The vast blockade fleet known as the Bastion could not hope to seal off an area of space like the Manticore Gulf with starships alone. Instead, over the two centuries they had been stationed on the Gulf's outer edge, the Iconoclasts had built multiple layers of defence, covering both realspace and the chaotic vagaries of jumpspace. If any ship attempted to breach the Bastion in normal flight it would be attacked by swarms of cortical drones, each one controlled by the dissected brain of a condemned heretic. If the drones were not enough, a layer of atomic mines awaited any potential escapee, before they came face to face with the massed batteries of the Bastion itself. If the escaping ship was foolish enough to ignite its light-drive and attempt a jump past the Bastion, the millions of vortex relays lurking in jumpspace would tear it to shreds.

  After the Manticore had dissipated, Red had been certain that the Bastion would break up, allowing them out of the Gulf. Godolkin, however, knew better. The fleet would stay in place forever, and not so much as a life-shell would be allowed to pass back into the Accord. Godolkin's desire for self-preservation, though, was already eroded almost to breaking point. If the Blasphemy had ordered him to try and get Omega Fury past the Bastion, he would have done so gladly, knowing full well he would die in the attempt.

  For the moment he sat quiet and still, sipping his water, while the two mutants debated the merits of trying to find a way out or staying within the Gulf and continuing the search for survivors. It was obvious who would win - not only was the Blasphemy by far the more forceful personality, but Judas Harrow still worshipped her completely. He would not seriously disagree with her.

  Fury might remain in the Gulf for a very long time. Godolkin wondered silently how many more dead planets he would have to walk.

  That led him to thinking about the storm, and whether it was still blasting away outside. It was impossible to tell: Omega Fury, while small, was a warship, its decks cocooned within multiple layers of armour and shielding. Whirlwinds of debris could be flying past the ship, and he might never know.

  He was considering this, letting his mind slide away from the pointless bickering taking place inside the refectory, when the ship moved.

  For the second time that day, Godolkin's enhanced senses picked up a stimulus too faint for his companions to notice. There had been no sound, no flickering of the lumes or gonging of alarms, but there had been a slight, but unmistakeable shudder through the deck.

  Harrow and the Blasphemy, both with their mouths wide open, had missed it entirely.

  Godolkin got up, ignoring their sudden glances. As he did so the ship moved again, more noticeably. When it became still, Godolkin saw that the water in his beaker was canted over at an angle.

  The ship was leaning. "Blasphemy, we need to take off."

  "But-"

  He pointed at the beaker. "Your choice, mistress," he spat. "Leave Sirion now or stay forever."

  Before she could answer the deck jolted horribly. The beaker jumped, came down on its edge and tipped, spilling it contents, and there was an awful sound from below the deck, a long, sawing moan of overstressed metal.

  If Fury tipped much further, there was a good chance the landing gyros would give out.

  Durham Red jumped up, eyes fixed on the spilled water. "Bloody hell," she hissed. "You're right. Let's get the sneck out of here."

  "Thy will be done," said Godolkin and found himself flying across the refectory as the ship dropped away from under him.

  2. SLINGSHOT

  Omega Fury had artificial gravity on all decks. The breed of generators that provided it were a technological miracle that had been saving the bone-density of spacefarers since long before Red had been born, and thankfully had managed to survive the scientific backsliding of the Bloodshed.<
br />
  Like any system, the gravity generators used power, and not even Fury's military-grade fusion core had unlimited resources. If the ship set down on a world with even approximately standard gravity, it shut the generators down by default, in order to save energy and let the crew get a feel for how much they were likely to weigh when they opened the hatches and set foot outside. The landing on Sirion had been no exception.

  So when Fury lost gyro stabilisation and toppled almost completely onto its port flank, its contents were subject to the planet's gravity, not its own.

  Luckily for Godolkin the refectory wasn't all that large, so he didn't have far to fall. Red reached out to grab his wrist as the port side of the deck dropped away, but for some reason he snatched his hand away and went tumbling backwards, thumping into the galley module in a shower of plastic beakers.

  Red had grabbed the table edge on reflex as the ship had gone over, and Harrow had been on the opposite side, safe from falling. She gave the mutant a quick glance to make sure he was all right, getting a nod in response, then looked back down the sloping deck.

  Godolkin was clambering to his feet. "Are you okay?" she called down to him.

  "I am uninjured," he growled. "The same will not be true of the ship if we do not lift off immediately."

  "No shit." Red started to edge along the table, holding on with both hands and keeping her boots planted firmly against the sloping deck. She was almost at the end when the ship dropped again, this time in the other direction. Her stomach swooped, and she yelped.

  "We're sinking," muttered Harrow. "Sacred rubies, what did we land on?"

  The deck was almost level again, although for how long Red didn't like to guess. "Let's have a good look from orbit, shall we?"