Black Dawn

by Peter J Evans

  "Trust? When have you ever asked me that?"

  Trewpeny smiled. It was a pretty stupid question. "Never mind. Just follow me, as close as you can."

  And he ran.

  It was hard to get a start on the slippery ground, but the snow gave him some traction, and his boots were well-made. In a moment he was haring off across the street, aiming himself at one of the hovels. The front of it was open to the elements, but the roof was intact and the far wall solid. No hiding place there.

  Then again, hiding wasn't on Trewpeny's mind.

  By the time he got to the house he was moving at quite a speed - there was a slight downslope to help him, not to mention a healthy measure of raw fear. He heard Slafot shout something, from very close behind, and a more distant racket that must have been the marshals giving chase. Neither sound slowed him for an instant.

  He went into the hovel as fast and as hard as he possibly could, through the open front, across the littered floor to hammer, shoulder-first, into the far wall.

  It hurt a lot but the rotted boards and bricks gave way as he struck, caving away from him with an awful scraping noise. Debris shattered away from the roof and crashed into the floor.

  A moment after Trewpeny had hit the wall, Slafot followed with a despairing yell. They went clean through it together.

  Behind them, the hovel seemed to twist on its foundation. The roof sagged, sending up a cloud of dust and powdery snow, and then in one almighty heave the entire structure seemed to burst outwards from the back wall. Shattered bricks careened past Trewpeny, whirling chunks of crumbling masonry spat out by the ruin as the whole house caved in on itself.

  Shouts sounded from the other side of it, and cries. The marshals must have been almost inside when the roof had come down.

  There were no gaps in the street of houses. Each had been built to rely on the next for support, and even now the ones on either side were starting to shed walls. The marshals would have a fair way to go before they could catch up with Trewpeny and Slafot, even assuming they could all still run.

  Incredibly, Trewpeny's mad plan had worked. Not without cost, though. His shoulder was alive with pain, and something had struck his head a glancing blow, setting it spinning. If Slafot hadn't hauled him up and away, he probably would still have been sitting in the snow when the marshals came back.

  As it was, they made it all the way back to the markets.

  Trewpeny had never known he could run so fast, or so far. By the time he and Slafot stopped, his lungs were on fire, and the freezing air going down into them felt like mouthfuls of needles. His heart had increased its thumping complaint until he was sure that it was about to rip its way free and come out of his chest.

  They were alone. The marshals were far behind. There had been no pursuit after the houses had come down.

  Slafot couldn't believe it, and had been saying so for the past few minutes. "I can't!" he was whispering, almost like a private prayer. "I just can't!"

  "I can't breathe," Trewpeny replied, pushing his right fist into his chest to try and calm his heart. The left hand was still, miraculously, clutching the canvas bag. Whatever lay inside must have been disinclined to explode after all - it had been subjected to enough battering during their escape.

  Slafot nodded, and found a darkened corner between two shopfronts. He pulled Trewpeny into it. "You rest here a minute."

  "Where are you going?"

  "To make sure no one's following our bloody bootprints this time."

  Trewpeny watched him walk away, looking carefully left and right.

  He still wasn't sure how long he had been away from the tavern, but by the way he was aching he could only assume that the angelus bell wasn't long away. There was little chance of getting back to his own door before then, so it would be a good idea to find somewhere to hide until the bell chimed and curfew was over. Then he could get back home, rub some balm into his wounds and wait for someone to come calling about a package.

  And sleep. If sleep would come.

  It threatened him now, amazingly. Standing in the shadows with a soul-destroying heresy clasped in his left hand, gasping down breaths so cold they made his ribs ache, he found his eyelids growing heavy. The night's rigours were finally catching up with him.

  He shook himself, and stepped back out into the open. If he leaned back against the wall there was a very good chance that he might fall prey to sleep there and then, and be a corpse by the time angelus rang. He would have to keep himself upright until he found a proper place for himand Slafot to wait.

  Where was Slafot? How long did it take to check the way was clear?

  Trewpeny listened for a time, but heard nothing.

  Maybe he'd fallen asleep after all.

  "Jon," he hissed. "Where are you?"

  There was no answer, not at first. Then Trewpeny heard a strange sound.

  It was no voice, but it came from a man's throat, of that Trewpeny was certain. It was a kind of bubbling groan, a sigh made through thick fluid; it was awful, terrifying, and it came from an alley to Trewpeny's right.

  He peered into the darkness. The sound didn't repeat itself, but now that he was looking hard he could see something there, a shape hunched against one wall. For a moment Trewpeny thought that the shape might have been a man, but he quickly corrected himself. There were similarities, but too many differences. A man could not have had a torso that was hinged open like a set of tavern doors, or a head that was so far askew on his neck and how could so much steaming matter, now spilled into the snow, have been fitted into that impossible body?

  No, there was nothing human in the alleyway. The part of Trewpeny's mind that was not instantly paralysed by shock, terror and revulsion wouldn't allow itself to believe it.

  He was still at the alley's entrance, fixed in place by the sight, when something behind him scraped against stone.

  He spun, but the dragon was already on him. He barely saw it: a vast shape, bigger than any beast he had ever seen, moving so fast it blurred in his vision. He caught an impression of clawed limbs, a glimpse of one huge eye, staring and open, of razored talons swiping towards him. Then control returned to his limbs, and he stumbled back.

  The action saved his life, at least for a while. The claws simply ripped across his chest, laying him open to the bone, instead of shearing away the entire front of his ribcage.

  Pain, colder than the worst nightwinter frost, sleeted up from the wounds and blinded him. He couldn't even cry out, as the agony took the breath from his aching lungs. All he could do was stagger back into the alley, the canvas bag still gripped in his fist as he clamped his arms reflexively across his opened chest.

  Blood, black in the fluttering lantern-light, poured down onto the snow.

  He took another step back, and his boot heel caught on something. There was no way he could stop himself from falling; the world tipped away from him, and he collapsed backwards into the reeking warmth surrounding the ruins of Jon Slafot. At the entrance to the alley, scant metres away, the dragon scrabbled to force its bulk between the stone walls.

  His last vision, before the pain took him away, was the glow of its huge eyes as the talons snapped and strained for his throat.

  4. CULTURE SHOCK

  Durham Red was the first of Omega Fury's occupants to wake up.

  It wasn't a pleasant process. Her first sensation was one of pain, a blunt spike of agony that wedged into her skull just above her left eye and pulsed solidly, causing waves of sympathetic nausea to clutch rhythmically at her gut. There was no light in these first moments, and very little sound, just the headache and an inky, throbbing darkness that smelled of burned wiring.

  She stayed motionless for a minute or two, trying to will the pain away, but the way her head hung forwards just made it worse. Eventually she realised that she would have to move if she wanted to feel any better. It wasn't something she really wanted to do - the way she felt, she would much rather have just stayed lolling in the sensor station and let
the universe carry on without her but there wasn't any choice.

  Red cursed under her breath, eased her head back and let her eyes flicker open.

  Moving caused the nausea to peak for a second, but then it faded, taking some of the pain with it. Red was pleased about that, but less happy with what she could see now that her eyes were open.

  Still nothing. She was either blind, or in darkness.

  Her left eyelid wouldn't come all the way up, and when Red raised a shaky hand to her forehead she could feel the swelling that was stopping it. Somehow, despite the workstation's safety harness, she had managed to strike her head quite badly. That alone, she reasoned, shouldn't have stopped her from seeing, so something else was very wrong.

  Maybe Harrow or Godolkin would know more. She licked her lips and called out, as loudly as she dared. "Guys?"

  It was barely a croak, but painful to hear anyway, and speaking was like spitting razors. Red coughed weakly and blinked a few times, wincing as the action sent more jags of pain into her forehead. It went some way to clearing her sight, though. Red's night vision was usually extremely good, one of the more useful facets of her mutation, although the longer she went without ingesting fresh blood the weaker it got. She had been rationing herself for weeks, surviving mainly on an emergency medical substitute, with occasional supplements from Harrow and Godolkin. It hadn't done her much good at all.

  There was a scrap of light coming from somewhere; Red looked around and saw that a couple of icons were glowing fitfully on the sensor board. There was no other light on the bridge. Even the emergency lumes were dead.

  Neither Godolkin nor Harrow had answered her call.

  Red sniffed warily. She couldn't smell any blood, which was a good sign. She could still smell smoke, though, old and stale, and the sharp, rusty tang of flames that had licked circuitry before dying.

  That wasn't a good sign. There had been a fire on the bridge, and now she was sitting in the dark. Red squinted, trying to make use of the pitiful light of her control board.

  Shapes began to resolve themselves from the gloom.

  To her right, Godolkin was slumped in the pilot throne, his great head hanging forwards. He was breathing, Red was relieved to see, slow and regular. As his form grew more detailed in her vision, he shifted slightly and murmured something.

  Red guessed he would be awake in minutes but she couldn't see Harrow. Godolkin was blocking her view of him. She leaned back, and the workstation throne, its safety locks robbed of power, simply slid free on its rails.

  The harness came free in her hands, and she stood up. "Jude?"

  There was no answer. Holding tightly onto the back of Godolkin's workstation, Red eased herself across the bridge towards Harrow. Either her sense of balance had been knocked awry when she had hit her head, or the deck was tilted under her feet by about thirty degrees.

  She got to Harrow's workstation, and saw the mutant sprawled inside it, half out of his throne and collapsed against the internal frame. For a moment Red feared the worst, that he had been torn from his harness during the impact and smashed fatally against the interior of the workstation, but as soon as she touched his shoulder he yelped and started, scrabbling to regain his balance. "Who's there?"

  "It's me. Are you okay?"

  She saw him bring a hand to his face. "I can't see."

  "What? Oh, don't worry about it. All the lights are off."

  "You sound as if you can see, holy one."

  "Yeah, but I always can." She patted his shoulder affectionately, and then leaned over to prod Godolkin. "Are you still with us, big man?"

  "It would seem so." He lifted his head and glanced around. "The power has failed."

  "Yeah." Red straightened up, feeling her spine click alarmingly. She must have been unconscious for hours. "Some kind of power drain."

  Godolkin slid himself back and out of the workstation. His night vision was almost as good as Red's, although for very different reasons. "This is no drain, Blasphemy. Even the air system has failed. Can you not smell the smoke?"

  "Yeah, but..." Red trailed off. The Iconcolast was right. Even in the most dire circumstances the emergency power system could keep the atmosphere recycled for months, using a few fractions of a volt to keep the airscrubbers ticking over. For the ship to have lost even basic life support spoke of a far more catastrophic failure.

  Red suddenly felt cold. When the slingshot manoeuvre around Easach had gone so horrifically wrong, and the ship had begun to haemorrhage both fuel and air, the planet Gerizim was the only survivable place they could possibly have set down on in time. They had managed to land the stricken ship in what appeared to be one piece but it seemed that the power core had not survived as well as the crew. Given what they had seen so far in the Manticore Gulf, that was not a comforting thought.

  Red shook herself. "Okay, I'll admit it's not looking good."

  "It's looking dark," Harrow interjected. "I still can't see anything."

  "Trust me, Jude, there's not much to see." She frowned, suddenly. "Hold on, I did see something..."

  She went back to her own workstation. Sure enough, two indicator icons still glowed there. She wasn't familiar with them, though. In fact, she wasn't sure that she'd ever noticed them before.

  Godolkin arrived at her shoulder. "Ah," he said.

  "Ah? Ah what?"

  He pointed. "This indicates a non-return in the power command chain, and this is a battery warning."

  Red stared at the two lights for a second or two, as if doing so would give her some clue as to what Godolkin was on about. It didn't. "Okay, I give up. What does that mean?"

  He sighed. "The first icon indicates that there is a complete and catastrophic break in the power feed between the core and the rest of the ship. The icon itself is powered by an independent battery, as there is no power, auxiliary or otherwise, to operate it. The second icon merely shows that the battery is running down."

  "Running down? Sneck, how long should it last?"

  "Not long. The appearance of the first icon is always the result of a crew-killing event. Its continued inclusion in modern vessels is regarded as something of a sick joke on the part of Iconoclast shipwrights."

  "Wonderful. So the power core is totally snecked, and the little light that tells us it's snecked is snecked too. Right?"

  Godolkin snorted, his modified right eye shining oddly in the darkness. "Profanity is the last refuge of the weak-minded, Blasphemy, and no, there is every reason to believe that the power core is intact."

  "There is?"

  "The existence of this ship as something other than an expanding cloud of free molecules would suggest it."

  Red swallowed. "Nice image, Godolkin. Thanks."

  Harrow was sliding himself back out of his workstation, his hands patting its frame as he guided himself entirely by feel. As the only one with unmodified eyesight, he was at a disadvantage on the stricken bridge. "So if the power chain is physically broken, is there a chance that the core itself still has power?"

  "It might have retained enough charge to sustain a reaction. There are safeguards against a total drain."

  Red nodded and then put a hand to her bruised forehead as the spike of pain drove a little deeper. "Ow. Okay, that's got to be our first priority. Godolkin, go aft and see what you can find out. Jude, stay put until I find a hand-lume. If we don't get this fixed, we're going to be here for a snecking long time..."

  Red was convinced that, if the ship had held together, her proposed double-slingshot around Easach and its companion singularity would have projected her and her companions out of the Manticore Gulf just as she had planned. In fact, once it had all gone wrong, she had spent most of that terrifying journey back out of the star's orbit royally cursing herself for not having thought of it earlier.

  It had been a good plan, one she was proud of. A pity, then, that it hadn't even come close to working.

  She blamed Sirion, and its ash-covered mass grave, for the slingshot's failure. A
lot of stress had been placed on the landing spine during the pit's collapse, and more during the take-off. Godolkin had warned her about microfractures, of course; the man could be sickeningly practical at times but she'd had faith in the ship, and the strength of its battle-armoured hull.

  Her faith had been misplaced. During the first stages of the slingshot, when Godolkin had dropped Fury into solar orbit and then throttled the main engines up to maximum thrust, the pressure cylinder had started to give way.

  Red still remembered the awful feeling of panic and despair that had sliced through her when the warning gongs had begun clamouring. There had been no mistaking what was going on - if the alarms hadn't been enough to inform her, the jerking vibration through the deck would have been. Omega Fury, in the midst of its first close transit around Easach, with its main drives sending out a hundred kilometres of raw plasma and its dampers straining to compensate for the massive thermal and gravitational stress, had started to come apart.

  The shriek of the air system as it strained to compensate had been awful, painful. Just from the sound of it, Red could tell it was on the brink of failure.

  There had been no question of carrying on with the manoeuvre. Godolkin had immediately throttled back and altered the ship's polar orbit to an equatorial one, in preparation for planetfall. When Red had asked him why, he had calmly informed her that the vessel's internal pressure would be equal to its external one within about forty minutes, and would she rather that balance occurred within an atmosphere or a vacuum?

  Red's exact reply was one of the things she couldn't exactly remember about the crash, which was probably just as well.

  While Godolkin was away in the drive section, the temperature within the pressure cylinder started to drop noticeably.

  Red first noticed it on her way down to the infirmary. Harrow had practically ordered her to accompany him there, after the light from a hand-lume revealed just how nasty the bruising to her forehead actually was. In all truth, Red had been feeling distinctly woozy and didn't argue when Harrow started talking about getting her to a trauma kit and somewhere to lie down.