Had they been embracing when they died?
She looked closer and saw flaking scratches on the skull of one body, the wrist bones of the other. She shuddered. These men had died tearing at each other's flesh with their bare teeth.
Elsewhere, more evidence of horror. A skeleton that had been blown apart, the lower half of it still sitting at a workstation, the remainder reduced to great shards of bone embedded in the station's control board. Further away another carcass lay with a rusted pistol lying among the scattered bones of its fingers, its own skull carbonised shrapnel. Near the map-table, a skeleton whose finger-bones were thrust into its own eye-sockets.
"Blasphemy," growled Godolkin. "These men died mad."
She nodded dully. "They killed each other, didn't they? The ones that didn't kill themselves. Christ, what a nightmare."
There were other doors leading away from this room, but Red had no desire to go through them. "I've seen enough. Godolkin, if your abbot is as nice a guy as you think, I pray he doesn't ever come down here."
Godolkin was studying a skeleton slumped over one of the second-level workstations, one that had a corroded knife-blade sticking out of the back of its skull. He lifted the corpse away, and Red saw that the blade went right through, into the board itself. "Ouch," she hissed.
The corpse had been lying across something. Godolkin lifted it carefully free; it looked like a thin slab of metal a handspan across. He handed it to Red. "Mistress?"
She took it, gingerly. As she turned it over a wad of pulpy dust slid out from between the two sides of it and shattered against the floor. She coughed as the musty stuff stung her throat. "Yech. It's a book, I think. Or was…"
The covers of the book were formed from some kind of metallic plastic. They had survived the years far better than the pages and the writing on the front cover was still quite legible.
"Oh my God," Red gasped. "It's in English."
Operations Manual, she read. Then, in smaller letters beneath, Luna Translation Centre Tycho-Alpha—Do not remove from ops room.
"Godolkin, how did this get here? How did this book get all the way out here?"
"What do you mean?" He must have seen the stunned shock on her face. "Mistress? What's wrong?"
She took a deep breath. It was suddenly hard to get air in the ancient chamber. "Earth had one moon," she told him. "We called it Luna. Tycho was a crater, one of the biggest—there was a city on it, back in my day. So either this book is a snecking long way from home, or…"
She looked up at him. "Godolkin, I think we're on the Moon!"
10
Drive
It was well after Compline and the monastery was in darkness. All the candles had been snuffed out. Where lumes provided light, they had been turned to their lowest setting by automatic timer.
Major Ketta sat on the hard little bed in her room, with every lume she could find blazing around her.
She usually preferred the dark. Perhaps a predilection for the shadows was part of the entrance requirement for the Iconoclast Special Forces, or maybe such a preference had been instilled in her as part of her conditioning. She had so little memory of what she had been like before recruitment that anything was possible.
It was true that her work often required her to operate in as little light as possible. Unlike the open brutality of the Iconoclast regular armies, her successes tended to rely on being hidden, unheard, unseen. While the shocktroopers were burning cities to bring wayward planets to heel, Ketta had, on more than one occasion, achieved the same effect with a climbing line, a data-pick and a slim-bladed knife.
Hers was the silent world, the shadow world. It was in darkness that she became truly alive.
On Lavannos, though, things were very different.
Here, the dark brought only terror. She had given up trying to sleep during the night, after the first few nightmares. Never, in all her days, had she been subject to such awful visions as those she dreamed in the Church of the Arch. Even before seeing what lay in the cavern, on the edge of the Eye of God, she had been in fear of her sanity.
She had seen worse sights in her time, that was the strange thing. She had stalked the cities of worlds blasted by hunger-guns, sifting through steaming human wreckage for survivors on which to practise her singular methods of information-gathering. She had witnessed mass executions, ritual decimations, scourging, disembowelling. The limits of suffering, both human and otherwise, were no new territory for her.
But Lavannos frightened her. Something about this tiny world, she had decided, magnified terror.
When she had last contacted Admiral Huldah Antonia, that terror had almost overcome her. Despite the darkness outside her room, and what she had seen in the lair of the monster wheel, she resolved to be more dignified this time. She had a reputation to uphold, after all.
Ketta would never have been able to keep a transjump comm array openly in her room and maintain her cover story. A simple pilgrim would never have access to such specialised equipment. Besides, comm-linkers of any kind were frowned upon in the retreat, as a distraction and a barrier to peace. An Iconoclast Special Agent, however, had access to equipment most soldiers of the Accord only dreamed about. Earlier that evening, she had taken various innocent belongings scattered about the room and built a comm-linker out of them.
The power-cells, slender and incredibly powerful rods of self-fusing polymer, were hidden in the spine of a book of scripture. The coder and input cascade were hidden in the picture-panels of a holy triptych; a rosary twisted just so became the signal-guide. The datastream transmitted by the array was very narrow, but it could go a long way without the need of Iconoclast relay stations.
The linker was already set to Antonia's crypt-key. Ketta tapped out a carrier code, activated the transmitter and sent the datastream leaping through jumpspace. Seconds later the code was picked up, verified, and returned with a comms signal on its tail. Antonia's voice scratched out through Ketta's earbud. "Datakey confirmed, Major Ketta. It's good to hear from you again."
"Het Admiral." Ketta prodded the earbud a little further in, trying to get a bit more volume. "I'm picking up more interference than usual. Is there a problem?"
"No, major, nothing that need concern you. You're probably getting some noise from the drives. Othniel is in jumpspace—we'll be with you very soon."
Ketta closed her eyes momentarily in relief, and was quite glad the signal wasn't strong enough for video. "That's good news, admiral. I'll not be sorry to leave this place."
"I'll send a landing craft before I turn Lavannos inside out, have no fear."
At the moment, fear was pretty much all Ketta had. "Admiral, how secure is this line?"
"Level three encryption," Antonia replied. "Why do you ask?"
"I have some vital information, for your reception only. If there is anyone with you, I suggest you send them away."
"There isn't."
"Good." Ketta squared her shoulders. This was going to take some explaining.
* * * *
"Blasphemy," said Godolkin levelly. "You are raving."
Red was stalking around the map-table in circles. "It's not impossible. I don't see how anyone could do it, but it's not impossible."
"Contrary to popular belief, Durham Red, some things are impossible." Godolkin had his arms folded implacably, his chin stuck out. He looked like a statue carved from white marble, massive and unmoveable. "Shifting planets is one of them. What do you think happened? You really think someone attached a line to this world and dragged it two hundred light years?"
"I don't know!"
"Earth is gone, Blasphemy. I know that fact is hard, but it must be faced. The planet of your birth has vanished from the cosmos. Surely it is more likely that this book, and only the book, made this journey?"
Red stopped pacing. "Okay, that is more likely. But this looks a lot like an ops room to me." She saw him open his mouth to speak and held up a hand. "Yeah, maybe I have got a screw loose. Maybe this who
le set-up is a fake, or a trap, or whatever. I don't know! But I've got to find out."
"How?"
"I'll let you know. In the meantime, you need to get back to Jude. Ketta's drug should have worn off by now."
Godolkin looked uncomfortable. "Mistress, if you are intent on pursuing this deranged quest, my place is at your side."
"Judas needs you more than I do right now." She took the key from a pocket and held it out to him. "He's in room eighty-five, end of the hall, upper floor. It's a mechanical lock so you have to put this into the hole and twist, okay?"
He frowned. "I'm not sure…"
"You don't have to be. Just be quick."
"Very well, Blasphemy." He took one of the guns from his belt and passed it to her. "Try not to make this one explode."
She watched him stride out of the room, then turned back to the bone-scattered ruin around her.
This was completely irrational, she knew that. If she was sensible she would be going with Godolkin right now, picking Jude up and flying Crimson Hunter off this rock and away. There was almost no chance she was right, a much greater chance of running into more brain-scooping maniacs. Not to mention Major Ketta. Now an Iconoclast knew she was here, it could only be a matter of time before the missiles started flying.
She knew all of this, but she couldn't bring herself to leave this mystery behind.
"Sensible is for wimps," she muttered.
A quick search of the room revealed no more clues. Red wasn't too surprised at this: any sufficiently advanced set-up would have all the relevant documents filed away on computer. The operations manual would be in hardcopy form, just in case an emergency took the computers down.
She just wished they'd made the pages from something a bit more durable.
There were three other doors leading off the upper level. One of them was jammed fast: Red knew she'd never move it without Godolkin's help. The next slid a quarter of the way and then stopped, but Red was slim. A quarter was all she needed.
The room beyond was smaller by far. It looked like an office, with a desk and what had been a comfortable chair. In a small adjoining chamber there was a narrow bunk, and next to that a fresher with a shower unit. A skeleton was crumpled in the shower, skull battered to pieces, a long metal bar lying next to it.
Red stood looking at the skeleton for some time, then sighed to herself and walked back into the office. She searched there for a few minutes, but found nothing of value or interest in any of the desk drawers. Most of the contents had rotted to dust anyway.
She went back into the larger space, the place she could only now think of as the ops room.
This excursion was looking more like a complete bust with every minute that went by. Red gnawed a fingernail nervously. If she didn't find something soon, it probably meant there just wasn't anything to find. She'd leave Lavannos never knowing what had happened here.
That would eat her away from the inside.
There was one more door to try, at the far end of the upper level. Red yanked and hauled at the hatch for a minute or two, without any more success than she had at the first door. It felt like it was close to coming open, but some ancient part of its locking mechanism was resisting her.
Godolkin could probably have done it. Red was strong, strong enough to tear a man's arm out of his socket one-handed, but she couldn't match Godolkin's muscle. It looked like she was stuck until he got back.
Unless…
Red groaned, leaned back and then slammed her forehead against the hatch. "You prat!" she snarled. "Christ, Durham, for a smart girl you're not all that bright, are you?"
She walked briskly back along the upper level, into the office, past the desk and into the fresher. When she returned to the door, she had the metal bar in her hands.
It made an effective pry bar, giving her all the leverage she needed to break the hidden lock and slide the hatch aside. Cool air rushed out at her as the door came open.
She had been hoping for another room, perhaps one with shelves laden with sturdy, time-proof documents. Instead, she saw another corridor, this one so straight and long that it seemed to dwindle away to nothing. She cursed under her breath.
A glance over her shoulder confirmed that there was still no sign of Godolkin.
The corridor looked intact. It was at least twice as high and wide as the ones she had seen so far, with a different, more hexagonal cross-section. The floor of it was bare metal, not rubber mesh, and there were open braces every few metres that seemed designed to trip up anyone who walked too close to the wall.
Red stepped through the hatch and began to run along the metal floor.
Her footsteps gonged, echoing up and down the tunnel. For a while it didn't look as though she was going anywhere, as brace after brace, panel after panel passed by in constant, identical succession. It was only when she had jogged about two hundred metres that she saw anything different: a small service hatch, set against the left-hand wall. Other than that, the features of the corridor seemed endlessly similar.
As it turned out, the tunnel was over a kilometre long. Red was quite out of breath when she arrived at the far end, and wondering why anyone would build such a long, dull corridor in what otherwise seemed a practical and efficient complex.
It was only when she got to the far end that she found out.
The tunnel wasn't a corridor. It was a maglev track.
There was a mag-car at the far end of the tunnel, resting neatly on the protruding braces. It fitted the cross-section perfectly, and had a metre-wide hatch on its flat, hexagonal end. Presumably the door from the ops room would only open when the car was there waiting: anyone wishing to get to the other end of the tunnel would step in, be whisked along, then step out of the opposite hatch. Simple, if the base had anything other than the barest wisps of emergency power.
Red tutted, and hauled herself up to the car's hatch. It slid aside easily, almost as if it had been oiled.
There were little bench seats inside, and places where grab-straps had once hung. Red walked between the seats and tried the far hatch. That opened without fuss as well. She was glad to finally find a door or two that did.
She jumped down from the car into a short hallway. There were lockers on either side of her, doors hanging forlornly open, rags and rot on their floors. And above a massive double-hatchway at the far end of the hall was a large metal plaque, the paint it had once sported now just flakes and coloured dust on the floor, but the words etched into it still legible after so many, many years.
tycho-alpha translation drive chamber
authorized personnel only
warning! radiation hazard!
radmeters must be worn at all times
have you checked your rods today?
Red gaped up at the sign. There it was, written into a metal slab four metres across, fixed and solid and undeniable. The proof she had been looking for. The book, and the complex of rooms and corridors she now stood in, belonged together.
Whatever murderous excesses the ill-fated occupants of this place had committed, at least none of them had taken the manual out of the ops room.
So this was the Moon. Not just a moon, orbiting an alien gas-giant in the middle of nowhere, but the Moon. Something had happened to it, back in the distant past, something that had rendered it unrecognisable—this complex, these rooms and systems and the crewmen they contained, had been here, under the Tycho crater, when the cataclysm had occurred. They had died here, trapped and insane.
Red walked slowly up to the double hatch, placed her hand flat against it. It was all starting to fall into place, she realised, the last pieces of the mystery sliding and locking around her like the components of some titan puzzle-box.
The key to it all was the translation drive.
She had heard the words long ago, before she had gone to sleep, back when she had hunted men for a living.
* * * *
She had been on the trail of a rogue scientist, a defector from an industr
ial corporation whose size and wealth were matched only by its ferocious protection of intellectual resources. For an employee to leave the company was unthinkable. For a senior technician to escape the corporate arcology with a slug of project data in his pocket required nothing less than a death sentence.
Red had initially balked at killing a man for trying to change jobs, but her opinion changed when details of the scientist's expertise were revealed to her. The man, she had been told, was a bio-weapons expert. He had already tried to sell viral agents to both sides in a planetary war, and was working on a delivery system for tailored cancers. Obediently, Red had found the scientist in hiding on Rotin's World, and had carried out her mission with extreme prejudice.
It was only later that she discovered the truth. The man had nothing to do with bio-weapons research at all. His field was advanced theoretical physics; Morris-Thorne wormholes, exotic matter, quantum inseparability. Methods of moving a starship between distant points without actually travelling through the intervening space. A translation drive.
Red had been duped, well and truly. It wasn't the first time and it wouldn't be the last, but that didn't make her like it any better.
She'd forfeited her fee by ripping the throat out of the man who'd lied to her.
It was all coming back to her now. A translation drive, the sales pitch went, would make conventional superlight travel obsolete. Comparing conventional phased transfer with quantum-translation was like comparing flights of stairs to high-speed elevators. In one case you had to slog laboriously from one floor to the next. In the other you got into a box, got out of it again and you were somewhere else.
It was a nice idea. But to Red's knowledge, not one that had ever gotten off the back of the dead physicist's notepad. Some trivial thing about the amount of energy needed to translate a small paper cup being greater than all the power generated by a galaxy over a million years, or some such bizarre calculation.
If Durham Red was right, a couple of centuries after she'd climbed into her cryo-tube, someone had cracked the problem.
Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Page 14
