"Sorry," she told him, as she eased herself down onto a pallet. "Just this damn bruise. My head feels like it's been picked up and shaken."
"It has," Harrow replied simply. He had retrieved a trauma kit from one of the infirmary's lockers, and was sorting through the sadistic-looking implements it contained. Red caught a glimpse of lume-light glittering from sleek metal and glass, and shuddered.
"Is it me, or is it getting really cold in here?"
"The outside temperature must be very low," said Harrow. He picked up a small pressure syringe, looked at it for a moment and then put it back in the kit and pulled out one twice the size. "And of course the heaters are offline, so the ship's heat is leaking away. Personally, I'm freezing. Hold still."
The syringe thumped and hissed against her neck, which hurt quite a lot. Red winced, reminded once again that Accord medical technology often lagged far behind that of her own day, "Bloody hell, Jude!"
"Forgive me." He put the syringe down and held the lume so he could check her bruise again. "You've been without fresh blood for too long, Red. You're not as resilient as normal. I'm sure your skull's not been fractured, but you might have a concussion. How much do you remember?"
"About the crash?"
"Godolkin won't like you calling it that," he smiled, "but yes."
"Not much." Red mulled it over for a few seconds, but the battering she had taken in the workstation was making things hazy. From what little she could recall, it seemed that most of her attention had been on Godolkin's efforts to keep the ship under some kind of control on the way down, as well as her own struggle to avoid having her skull smashed on the inside of the workstation. Both of them had failed. "I think it started off all right, didn't it? Then the ship had some kind of panic attack, and Godolkin lost it."
Harrow nodded, and sat down on the opposite pallet. "From what I saw, Fury initiated an emergency landing protocol. There was no way Godolkin could keep control."
"Why the sneck would it do that?"
"I'm not sure. A failure in the data-engines, possibly, some kind of short-circuit from the fires. Unless it picked up a beacon."
"A beacon?" Red snorted. "I wish."
There was no beacon: Gerizim was as dead as any other world in the Gulf. Red had scanned it briefly before Godolkin had engaged the main drive and headed for Easach. She had seen the huge wounds that marred its surface: the distinctive hemispherical craters left by Brite Red's time-weapons and the sensorium had been adamant that there was no power or radio emission from Gerizim at all.
The atmosphere of this world was clear, with no choking clouds of ash to darken its surface but for all that it was just as lifeless as Sirion. If Omega Fury's computers had thought otherwise, they must have been in the grip of what Red could only think of as some kind of hallucinatory seizure.
By the time Godolkin had managed to tear control away from the ship's deranged data-engines it had all been too late. Fury had been too close to the surface, and too badly damaged for any kind of landing. The grav-lifters had failed on the way down, leaving Godolkin no chance to slow the ship's descent. They had left a trail of fire through the air as they went and had hit the ground very hard and very fast.
Red had lost consciousness at the first impact. Perhaps that had been a blessing. When she thought about what must have happened next, of the ship slamming back into the air and then coming down again, before sliding and tearing and ripping some vast channel through the hard ground of Gerizim, she considered herself quite lucky not to have seen it.
There are worse things than being dead to the world, when the world comes up and smashes you in the face.
By the time Godolkin got back from the drive section, Red was feeling a great deal better, if increasingly chilly. She sat up on the pallet as he came in, tilting her head as if showing off her bruises from different angles. "Well? How do I look?"
"If anything, more satanic than normal." He had a lume of his own, and an emergency toolkit in his other hand. He set both down on the floor and dropped into the nearest seat. "As I suspected, the fusion core is intact. The secondary charge array is also functional."
Harrow was across the infirmary, perched on a diagnostic board. "So the only problem is the break in the power feed?"
"Not the only problem, no."
"Ah."
"Indeed." He reached into the toolkit and took out a small bottle of water, taking a swig from it before he continued. "There were fires in the drive compartment. Some were still alight when I got there."
Red felt herself sag. "Balls."
"The fires themselves did little damage, nothing that cannot be repaired. Their source, however, is a cause for concern."
"Electrical fire?"
"Correct. It appears that the core's entire charge vented through the hull. This in turn fused the secondary feeds, and drained the auxiliary core. Every microvolt of generated power on this vessel has been lost."
"That's not good," Red muttered. "Any chance of getting them up and running again?"
Harrow shrugged. "The secondary core can be used to kick-start the primary. Most Iconoclast vessels have an emergency recharge system, do they not?"
"They do," agreed Godolkin. "Solarvoltaic cells are integral to the outer hull layers. Regrettably, these were destroyed by the energy discharge, along with the shadow web, most of the sensorium and communications array, the targeting cascade, the-"
"Okay!" Red held her hands up. "We get the snecking picture. Fury's a coffin."
Godolkin appeared to consider this. "Were we still in space at this point, our lives would be effectively forfeit, this I grant you. However, Gerizim was a terraformed colony world before the Manticore's assault. It is likely that the biosphere is at least partly hospitable. In any case, the atmosphere is breathable. A fair proportion of the air in this room is external."
Red glared at him. "So it's a coffin with holes in it. Sneck, I thought it was getting cold..." She swung her legs around and dropped down from the pallet, landing carefully to avoid slipping on the tilted deck. "Show me."
"Blasphemy?"
"The damage. Come on, I need to see this for myself."
The docking hatches relied on motors to open, but in the absence of any electrical power they could be operated by more archaic means. Godolkin took a long steel lever from behind a panel in the lock chamber, fitted it into a gear mechanism and used it to crank the hatch open. As soon as the two halves of the lock began to separate, freezing air rushed in. Red felt it on the bare skin of her arms and cursed, stepping away from the hatch. It had to be twenty below out there, maybe even colder.
There were thermocowls in the docking chamber, and Red shrugged into one as soon as she felt the outside chill. By the time Godolkin had the hatch open both she and Harrow were bundled up in the thick garments, their bodies warmed by tiny electric heaters. Godolkin gave them both disparaging looks and simply stepped out of the hatch in his shipboard clothes, no more than uniform trousers and a light jacket to cover his frame. He never seemed to notice the cold.
The hatch had opened onto utter darkness.
Red followed Godolkin out, holding the hand-lume up high. The light was set to medium strength so as to conserve the battery - there would be no way to recharge it once it was exhausted - and it only threw out a narrow cone of light. In the unremitting night the lume's glow seemed to just vanish.
Shivering, and not just from cold, Red clambered down from the hatch and onto Gerizim's hard ground. She trotted over to where Godolkin was standing, head tilted back to look at the sky. He was frowning, as though deep in concentration.
"What?" she asked, her voice dropping to a whisper even though there was no one on the planet to overhear her. "Do you see something?"
The Iconoclast didn't answer, just stayed there gazing up at the heavens. Just when Red was about to ask him again he looked back down to her and shook his head. "Nothing of note, mistress."
He was lying, but Red wasn't in the mood to push i
t. She wandered away from the ship, trying to get a better view of where Fury had come down.
The lume didn't show her much, but she could see that the entire front of the ship was buried in a mountain of torn rock and soil. Debris had been flung everywhere by the force of the crash, sowing the ground with huge, frosty divots of soil. Behind the drive section, a wide trench was scored out of the ground, vanishing into the lightless distance.
Godolkin had moved back to the ship's flank, and was studying some torn plating in the light from his hand-lume. As Red drew closer she could hear a faint whistling noise. "Sneck, is something coming out of there?"
"This duct is a component of the air system," he replied. I believe the primary atmospheric leak is centred here, although stress fractures may continue up the duct for some way."
"Great." She leaned close, peering through layers of hull plating and scorched cables. "I suppose all this was caused by the crash."
"If not caused, then exacerbated." Godolkin moved away again. Red stayed looking at the hole for a while, trying to work out what it would take to patch it.
Power, she thought glumly. Fury was designed to remain independent for months, and almost any damage could be repaired using the ship's on-board maintenance kits. If the core could be brought back online, Godolkin could have the ship spaceworthy, if not exactly operating at peak efficiency, within a matter of days.
Without the core, there was no power to operate the kits, nothing to fuel the welders and heavy light-drills, no way to run vital diagnostic checks or hunt down microfractures. Without the core, Omega Fury was a metal corpse, utterly inert.
That might not have been too much of a problem, had it not crash-landed within the Manticore Gulf.
"There's water here," Harrow shouted, from the other side of the ship. "Well, ice."
"That's a bonus." Red ducked under the ship's stern to join him. "We might need that if we're going to be here a while."
The light from Harrow's lume was high, several metres above Red. She shone her own lume around and saw that the mutant was standing partway up a steep incline. He was studying a great shard of ice, as long as his own leg, that was jutting from the ground beside him. "There must be a stream close by," he said. "Running water of some kind, but frozen solid. Fury went right through it. These pieces are everywhere."
"Oh."
"Something else, holy one, which may not be such good news. I see no plants."
Red blinked up at him. "And?"
"If there are no plants in this vicinity, there will be no animals either. It may be difficult to find food."
"This isn't getting any better, is it?" She bounced on her feet, stuffing her hands deep into the cowl's pockets. "I mean, there must be plants somewhere. We're breathing after all but it would have been nice to find an orchard or something right next to us."
Harrow smiled sadly. "It would."
"As it is, we're bloody stuck." She began to walk up the slope, passing him in a few strides and carrying on up. "There's no way of getting the core up and running, so we can't fix the ship. Even if there was anyone in the Gulf to rescue us, we can't send a distress call. We're trapped on a dead planet with a dead ship."
She had reached the top of the slope, and stood there, shivering in the icy wind. Above her, a few stars glittered fitfully in the darkness, fading out as invisible clouds scudded across the sky. "Honestly, Jude. I don't know if I can see a way out of this one."
"Please don't give up hope, holy one." Harrow started to climb the rest of the way. "The Manticore's weapons might have left some pieces of technology intact, out among the debris. It may be possible to fashion a crude transmitter. Even an electrical spark can be picked up by a ship's sensorium, if it is powerful enough."
"Yeah, but we haven't got a spark, have we? We've got no bloody power at all!" She puffed out a long breath, and folded her arms tight across her chest. Despite the thermocowl, she was getting thoroughly chilled.
Then she froze, squinting out into the dark. "What the sneck's that?" she breathed.
"Holy one?" Harrow was beside her now, his hand-lume held high. "What is it?"
"Jude, switch your lume off." When she had folded her arms, she had dropped her own lume down to her side. In that moment of still darkness, she had seen, or imagined that she had seen, something that should not have been on Gerizim.
No, she hadn't imagined it. Now Harrow's lume was off, she could see it quite clearly.
Light. A smudge of grubby yellow light, off to Fury's starboard. It was tiny, barely visible, but it didn't look like the light from any moon or hint of daybreak. It was too compact, too concentrated.
Something, out in the night, was glowing.
"Jude, get Godolkin up here," Red whispered, "and tell him to bring a pair of binocs. I think we've found our beacon."
The source of the light was about ten kilometres from Fury's resting place, beyond a series of low hills. On any civilised world they would never have seen it; the glow it put forth would have been lost amid a sea of light-pollution. Here, under Gerizim's unbroken night, it shone.
It took them an hour to get within sight of it. For a while it had been concealed behind the curve of a low, rock-strewn cliff, but once Red passed the edge of that she stopped and shut off her hand-lume. "Eyes only from this point, guys. Someone might be looking."
She dropped into a crouch, taking instinctive cover behind a jumble of fallen stone. Her companions followed suit, Harrow on one side of her, Godolkin the other. With the lumes shut down, the landscape disappeared again, cliff and hills and even the ground beneath Red's feet vanishing into the darkness. Only the pool of light ahead of them was visible.
She lifted the binocs and peered through the viewfinders. There was a faint whine as the device focused, and suddenly Red was looking at an expanse of vivid green stripes, almost edge on to her and divided into flattened rectangles. "Blimey," she breathed.
Harrow nudged her. "What do you see?"
"Ploughed fields, I think. This image enhancement is rubbish, makes everything look like neon..." Her view moved higher, above the stripes. The rectangles grew smaller, and then suddenly stopped in a hard line. Red scanned up a little further, and gasped.
It was a wall.
There was no mistaking it, even with the binocs turning the world a lurid, swarming green. Out beyond the fields, two or three kilometres from where Red crouched, a great wall of hewn tree-trunks reared up at the sky.
It was hard to judge the wall's scale, but it was certainly impressive. Red could see the ends of it set into round towers, and then continuing on into the distance. To the left was a flat glitter that could only have been ice, and spars of material poked into it at random angles. To the right, the wall shelved away to meet more towers.
She was looking at a city and the city was alive.
Dozens of lights dotted the wall, and many more shone from within. The towers shone brightest, from window-holes cut into their upper sections, and a tall rectangle of lights outlined what could only have been a massive gateway.
This was no relic from before the Manticore. This city was occupied, and kept lit at night-time. There were a lot of lights. Someone must have invested considerable effort into keeping the place bright.
Red lowered the binocs. "We've got company," she said.
Godolkin had his head back again, glaring up at the sky. Red handed Harrow the binocs and gave Godolkin a shove. "What the sneck are you looking at up there?"
"The stars," he replied finally. "They have barely moved since I first surveyed the damage."
"So?"
"On a world with any normal rotation, they would have appeared to move further."
Red made a disgusted sound. "Godolkin, I couldn't care less about the stars, okay? There's a bloody city out there."
"One that gives off no electromagnetic radiation at all," Harrow interrupted. "Except lights, and I think they may be small fires. They're flickering."
"So either they're reall
y well-shielded, or..."
"No technology." Godolkin put a hand out for the binocs, and brought them to his face as soon as Harrow handed them across. "But a considerable workforce, judging by the wall and the surrounding fields. Blasphemy, that city could house several thousand people. Maybe tens of thousands."
Red turned away from the sight, and put her back against the stone. "So we've got a city on a dead planet that's sticking piers into a frozen river, burning torches and no electricity. Oh, and a bunch of ploughed fields, but no plants. Am I the only one that thinks this is a bit weird?"
Godolkin shook his head slightly. "Not once one considers the stars, no. However, you still choose to ignore that."
"Stars my arse. All I'm thinking about is the chance of us finding anything useful past that gate. One thing's for snecking certain, I'm not going in there dressed in a thermocowl." She lifted the hem of the heated garment glumly, and let it drop again. "I'm getting a seriously low-tech vibe fromthis place."
"What do you suggest?" Harrow asked, his voice a whisper despite the empty kilometres between him and the city. "I'm not sure if Fury holds much of a historical wardrobe."
"The Omegas didn't go in for fancy dress, huh?" Red chuckled. "Right now, we'll watch and wait. Fury's not going anywhere, and I reckon I'm already as cold as I'm going to get. We'll see what the local clothes are like when someone comes out to those fields. It'll be morning soon."
"It could be," Godolkin muttered. "On the other hand, Blasphemy, you could be facing a very long night indeed."
"Written in the stars, huh? Just shut up and hand those binocs over." Red was starting to see what Godolkin was getting at, but she wasn't about to give him the satisfaction. Instead she settled into her hiding place, trying to keep the thermocowl wrapped as tightly around her slender frame as possible, and went back to studying the city.
One way or another, she was going in through that gate.
Black Dawn Page 7
