Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave

by Peter J Evans

  He held out a plastic goblet, brimming with sickly-looking fluid. Red took it from him and sniffed it. "Yeuch. Cheers, Jude. What did I ever do to you?"

  He grinned. "It will help, holy one. Trust me."

  The stuff didn't taste as bad as it looked. Red finished half of it, then rested her forehead against the port. Harrow was still looking at her, his young, blandly handsome face creased in concern.

  "What happened?" he asked finally.

  Red shrugged. "It all just came up and hit me, I guess." She saw his eyebrows go up. "All that time… I've lost everything, Jude. Everything I'd ever known. People, places, all the stuff I was going to do once I'd earned enough bounty. I threw it all away."

  She turned herself around, leaning her shoulders back against the viewport. She didn't want to look at jumpspace anymore. "You can't think about things like that, you know? It's just too big, too scary. I've spent the last six weeks doing everything I could not to think about it."

  "Six?"

  "Oh, right." She made a vague gesture. "Eight months dosed up to the eyeballs don't count. But now it's all beginning to catch up with me. It's been trying to for ages, you know. At the back of my mind, ever since Wodan. But I've always been pretty good at shutting that kind of thing away."

  "I thought you recovered quickly, at the time." He folded his arms. "But I paid it no heed. You are a saint, after all."

  "I'm no saint, Jude. Sneck, I'm not even strong enough to hold it all off any more." She handed the goblet back to him. "And a cup of green sludge just isn't what I need right now."

  "What do you need?"

  "I need to go back to Pyre."

  Harrow's expression didn't change, but a nervous tic quirked at the corner of his mouth. "You know, for a moment there I could have sworn you said—"

  "I've got to get back to Pyre, Jude. I don't know why I do, I just do. You'll help me?"

  Harrow rubbed a hand back through his sandy hair. "Holy one, I'm not even sure Pyre can still support life. The Tenebrae had turned it into a charnel pit well before the Iconoclasts razed it, and when the forces of the Accord burn a world, it stays burned!" He backed off and dropped heavily into the command throne. "Not to mention the patrols that might still be there. I wouldn't be surprised if the patriarch had ordered a killship or two to stay around, just in case of stragglers. It pains me to say it, Red, but of all the ideas you've had this rates among the most deranged."

  "I never said it would be easy, did I?" She made her way over to the navigation throne, the seat next to Harrow. "Jude, if I don't go back, if I don't get this thing sorted out, it's going to pull me apart. You understand? I can't run away from this any more."

  "But—"

  "It's a done deal, Jude." She looked back at the control board. The clock was still there, little gothic characters still rolling down the display. Eight months. Twelve hundred years and eight months. "Either you'll take me or I'll get there myself."

  Harrow sighed. "Holy one, you can't even get to the fresher by yourself." She gave him a look and he put his hands up. "All right! I yield… But on conditions."

  "You're giving me conditions?" For all her exhaustion, she couldn't help but smile. "You grow a pair in the last eight months?"

  "When all's said and done, holy one, it is my ship."

  Red put her head back and closed her eyes. "True."

  "So we'll take the long way around. It will attract less attention, and give you longer to heal. Once we make orbit, we run at the first sign of trouble—from orbital weapons platforms to a chance of rain. Do we have a deal?"

  The cabin was very warm and the navigation throne oddly comfortable. Red felt herself getting heavy. Was something happening to the gravity? She wanted to answer Judas Harrow, to tell him that yes, they did have a deal, but it was all too much effort. She decided to rest for a little while, and continue the conversation when she was stronger.

  When she rose from her slumber, there was a blanket draped over her, and Crimson Hunter was speeding back towards Pyre.

  4

  Shalem

  There was a fire in the Angel Vault.

  Antonia was already on her way there when she heard the alert chimes. The mag-car she was riding up from the Cloister Ring had relay sounders, feeding the chimes in through hidden audio panels. The car's usual background chants were suddenly drowned out by the gonging cacophony of the fire alarm.

  Antonia snarled a curse. Othniel was in the Angel Vault.

  The car eased to a stop, braking clamps hissing as they locked the vehicle down to its rail. Antonia barrelled out of it as soon as the doors started to open, clattering down the steps and into the access hall. Rows of Iconoclast warriors snapped to attention as she darted past, towards the outer lock doors, but she ignored them. This wasn't the time for drill.

  Inside the airlock was the only place Antonia couldn't hear the fire alarm.

  While the lock cycled through its procedures, she snapped a comm-linker free from her belt and keyed a channel. "Omri!"

  "Het Admiral." Omri was Shalem's tech-prime, the temple-station's most senior engineer. Antonia had never heard him raise his voice, or speak in any manner other than one of perfect calm, not in seven years of service. He had a serenity that she envied. "Where are you?"

  "Southern lock," she replied, trying to keep her voice as level as his. "Omri, the fire: is it Othniel?"

  "Negative, Het. It's the Novabane."

  Antonia put her thumb over the linker's pickup while she sighed in relief. As admiral of the temple-station she should have shown no preference to any one ship over another, but she couldn't help it. Othniel was important to her.

  Novabane was tethered near the Vault's northern lock; she would need her gravity-scow to get close. "Do what you can, Omri. I'll be there in four minutes."

  "Agreed, Het. Omri out."

  Abruptly, the inner lock began to slide open. Antonia felt a breeze of equalising pressure, felt the thin coolness of Angel Vault air filling the lock chamber. She clipped the linker back onto her belt and stepped out onto the platform beyond.

  The hazy vastness of the vault filled her view.

  The Angel Vault acted as the dry dock and refit facility for the temple-station. Kept pressurised, but free from gravity, it took up the entire centre section of Shalem, a vast, buttressed sphere fully thirty kilometres across. The inner surface of it was a riot of detail, misting away into shadow and outline on either side—smoke from arc welders, fusion cutters and a hundred mighty incense furnaces tainted the vault's air, making it impossible to see right across from one lock to another, even when there were no ships inside. Antonia could smell the sweetness of it, the faint tang of ozone.

  And fire-smoke, even from the opposite end of the vault. This was no minor deck blaze, she realised; Novabane must be in serious trouble.

  She couldn't see Novabane from where she was standing. Othniel was tethered close to the southern lock, hanging in the air like a great knife-blade, blocking her view. Antonia, not for the first time, found herself looking up at it in awe; this mighty dreadnought, poised in the mist like a steel fish five kilometres high, finned, fanged and studded with the gaping, pitted maws of its hunger-guns.

  For a moment, the sheer size of it stopped her where she stood. She scanned its grey, panelled hull, looking for secondary fires, seeing only the piercing sparks of welding guns, the glow of beacons and the darting flares of hundreds of gravity-scows. The open wounds along the dreadnought's starboard side had been almost entirely patched. Antonia could see helot-workers, little more than motes at this distance, scrambling about the last exposed decks.

  She cursed herself and turned away. Standing around gawping wasn't going to help anyone. She began trotting down the steps that led off the platform, down to where her personal gravity-scow was tethered.

  Most of the scows were simply open sleds, fitted with grav-drives and the most rudimentary of controls. Thousands of them would be drifting around the Angel Vault at any one t
ime, ferrying helots or supplies, acting as mobile work-platforms, cranes and observation decks. In a space as vast as the vault, they were the only sensible way of getting around.

  As admiral of the temple-station and master of the flagship Othniel, Antonia had several scows devoted to her own personal use and kept on permanent standby—one was stationed at each of the four entrance locks, and several in reserve. Antonia jumped the last few steps, landing neatly on the deck of the scow. "Pilot," she yelled, scrambling past the guard-warriors ranked against the sides. "Get us to the Novabane!"

  The scow unlatched from the platform and accelerated smoothly away. Antonia stopped behind the pilot, steadying herself against the back of his throne with one hand. She would normally have settled into a comfortable, yet subtly armoured seat of her own for a scow-journey, but she didn't feel like sitting.

  The scow angled slightly, swooping past the gaping forward section of Othniel. Antonia saw the cavernous mouths of spinal-mount weapons scanning past her, then they were beyond the dreadnought and out into the vault itself.

  There were six ships tethered within Shalem. Antonia saw Fearwing close to Othniel's port flank, still missing her primary drives, and the frigate Telemachus out in the vault's centre. Antonia strained forward, leaning over the scow's rail, trying to catch a glimpse of Novabane.

  There, behind Telemachus. Antonia gasped. The support cruiser Novabane was ablaze from prow to stern.

  Antonia was still so far from the ship, that she could cover it with the palm of her hand, but she already knew the ship was lost. The forward end of the vessel was nothing more than a billowing cloud of yellow fire, spitting great chunks of debris out into the vault as its internal munitions blew. As she watched, one of Novabane's belly hangars burst, vomiting smoke and corpses, the heat of it catching several nearby scows and sending them whirling away in flames.

  The blaze was moving back along Novabane, towards the drives.

  They were closer now. Antonia could hear the fire, the muted thunder of it, the snapping hiss of molten armour. Half the ship was skeleton.

  Another scow was curving in to meet them. The guard-warriors behind Antonia brought their weapons up but she waved them away. "Omri," she called. "What in hell happened?"

  The other scow matched course, drawing close alongside. Omri was at the rail, his tech's robes blackened with soot. His face as well, or what was left of it. "Damper feedback," he told her calmly. "Must have been building up in the charge capacitors for weeks, some kind of power-spill. By the time we caught it the ducts were already—"

  A thumping roar from Novabane cut him off in mid-sentence. Antonia ducked reflexively and saw pieces of burning metal whirling through the air, laying tracks of smoke across the vault. One of them whined close to the scow, passing a hundred metres under Antonia's boots before embedding itself in the wall of the vault.

  Omri hadn't moved. "Het Admiral, I believe the Novabane to be a lost cause. Permission to withdraw fire crews and tow her outside."

  Antonia paused, looking back towards the stricken cruiser. The battle around Broteus had already torn her fleet to practically nothing, eight ships out of a complement of forty. And to lose another…

  But if Novabane's reactor went critical in the Angel Vault, she'd have no ships and no station either. "Granted. Full authorisation to use the main lock and whatever scows are needed, tech-prime. Get that hulk off my station!"

  * * * *

  Novabane never blew. Towed by dozens of gravity-scows into the Angel Vault's great cylindrical airlock and ejected into space, the ship burned only for thirty minutes or so before lack of oxygen killed the flames. The scorched hulk, reduced to nothing but a thousand tonnes of worthless scrap, was towed out to a safe distance by one of the temple-station's two undamaged killships.

  It was still there. Antonia could see it from the viewports of her chambers, a blackened speck, tumbling slowly against the starfield. She was probably going to have to blow it up as a hazard to shipping.

  As if she didn't have enough on her plate. First the Broteus fiasco, then Gaius, now this.

  She turned away from the port and went back to her desk. Her chambers, in respect of her rank, were fairly spacious even by Iconoclast standards. In addition to her bedchamber, reception area, null-gravity pool, chapel and refectory, she also kept a fully-featured administration office. Previous admirals had passed such duties to lesser officials, but Antonia liked to keep the running of the station under her own, direct control.

  There were times, like today, when she regretted that preference.

  High Command had already sent her two requests for situation updates: one ten weeks previously, the other two days ago. She hadn't answered either of them, and the longer she left it the harder it got. What could she tell them now? That a ship had caught fire in the bowels of her own temple-station, killed almost three hundred of her people, and wrecked seventy scows before she'd finally managed to get it free? They'd have her head on a spike.

  Besides, she still hadn't filed her official report on Broteus.

  Antonia dropped into her seat and slumped forwards, resting her forehead against the cool, polished surface of the desk. The chambers felt warm; too warm, even though she had stripped out of her uniform armour. She'd changed into more casual attire for the night's administrative duties, a plain fabric leotard and trousers. She'd have preferred less, but Gordia, her most trusted bodyguard, was stationed just outside her door with a squad of shocktroopers. They could burst in at any moment and Antonia liked to keep some dignity, even in these troubled times.

  The armour was off being cleaned. It smelled of smoke.

  Eventually she sagged back in the chair and picked up the dataslate she was using for the Broteus report. She had been working on it for the past week, trying to word it so that she wouldn't be relieved of command as soon as the transmission reached Curia.

  From a certain point of view, that incident could be passed off as simple bad luck. Ten months ago, when the monstrous Durham Red had managed to get her foul body dragged upright out of the grave, the Tenebrae had billowed out of their hiding places and laid waste to entire systems in her name. Had Antonia been on Shalem at the time, she would no doubt have been ordered on a punitive mission, combining forces with some of the other stations to deliver the Tenebrae fleets a crushing blow.

  Bad luck indeed, then, that she was on freighter escort at the time.

  The Shalem fleet was on its way back from collecting a planetary tithe. The mutant world of Broteus had given up its entire output of foodstuffs and materials for that solar year, loading it into bulk-freighters under the weapons of the Iconoclast vessels. The cost of the tithe was great—a tenth of the Brotean population would most likely starve during the coming year, but that was no concern of Antonia's. Besides, regular tithes were part of the laws of Accord dominion, and the mutant scum on Broteus bred like flies.

  All had gone well until the return journey. Antonia was anxious to be back at Shalem, ready to pick up any news of Gaius as soon as it arrived. In addition, she'd left the temple-station with only two killships and a handful of support craft as protection; standard procedure on an important tithe-extraction, but one that always made her nervous.

  The Shalem fleet, surrounding the freighters in defensive formation, had been preparing to leave orbit and go to superlight when they had been ambushed. One moment, the sky was clear. The next it was full of jump-flares and huge, slab-sided Tenebrae battleships.

  In seconds, half of Antonia's vessels were shattered, riddled with antimat fire and flayer missiles. Most of the weapons had been launched in the last seconds before emerging from jumpspace: the Broteans had known that the Tenebrae fleet was nearby, and given them Antonia's exact position.

  The battle was horribly one-sided. Antonia herself almost died with her flagship. The Tenebrae battlecruiser Eviscerator got close enough to Othniel to punch an antimat broadside clear through the killship's shields, ripping a track of blazing holes a
long her side. Half of Othniel's energy dampers, essential to the ship's protection, vanished in the blast. The rest failed seconds later as the overload reduced them to slag. Without the dampers there was no way for Othniel to absorb shield hits, weapons recoil and reactor heat. Even the stresses of manoeuvre could rip the ship in two.

  Accepted doctrine in such a situation was to accelerate Othniel to ramming speed and take as many of the Tenebrae with her as possible—the classic "blaze of glory" scenario. Antonia, however, held her own skin in rather higher regard than that, and instead initiated a phased shutdown of Othniel's systems. In a few, frantic seconds she managed to simulate a cascade power-failure throughout the ship, with such skill that Eviscerator, hungry for victims, had drawn close and opened her boarding hatches.

  At the last moment, Antonia had opened up Othniel's fusion drives to maximum thrust, sending five sun-hot tongues of raw plasma right down Eviscerator's throat.

  The effect had been as instant and brutal as turning a blowtorch on a human brain. Its bridge and command functions vaporised, drives flaring, the lobotomised battlecruiser went whirling out of control. Two frigates took it without trying.

  That had given Antonia just enough of a gap to take Othniel, and the remnants of her fleet, into superlight and away. She'd had to leave at least three ships behind, their phased-transfer engines crippled. She could only hope they'd been able to blow their own reactors before the Tenebrae boarded them.

  Othniel's crew had cheered on her return to Shalem, but Antonia couldn't see the result as anything less than absolute disaster. In one battle she had effectively lost the temple-station's protective fleet, leaving it with only two active killships and its own integral weapons to rely on. Had the Tenebrae followed them through jumpspace, they could have taken the base with ease. Luckily, they had stayed to plunder the freighters, and soon after that the uprising had faltered.