Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave

by Peter J Evans

  She took a comm-linker from its pouch and flipped it on. "Pilot?"

  "Still here, Het Major." The dropship pilot wore heavy biodressings on his left shoulder and the side of his face. He hadn't been too affected by the psychic scream, but his copilot had gone insane and attacked him with her bare teeth. He had been shooting the madwoman dead when the landing craft had hit the monastery.

  "Have you run the systems checks I asked for?"

  "They are just completing now, Het." She saw him studying his readouts. "All primary systems are online. Once enough of the rubble is clear of the intakes, I can be away."

  "What about the landing spine?"

  The pilot shook his head. "I'm sorry, major. The gyros are down. I can hover, just, but if I try to set down there's a better than even chance of shattering the primary bearing." He turned aside to touch a control, then came back into view. "Which, according to the internal sense-engine, has a status of 'Moribund'."

  "Acknowledged. Do what you can."

  "Thy will be done."

  Would it? wondered Ketta. Her will would be to get off Lavannos in the next minute, fly home to Shalem and spend some time not being afraid any more. She wasn't used to fear, it wasn't an emotion she usually had any truck with. But this place, and whatever alien nightmare the abbot and his monks had been growing, had her chilled to the very bone.

  She hoped, when she was finally away, that she would be able to sleep again, and not relive the mind-tearing horror of that scream.

  The heretic Godolkin was looking at her. She walked towards him.

  It was a pity he had been enslaved by the Blasphemy. He had, by all accounts, been a most exceptional shocktrooper, rising to the rank of Iconoclast First-Class by battlefield prowess alone. He must have seen vast amounts of conflict—his skin, beneath the charm-tattoos, was a mass of scar tissue. His body was powerfully muscled, his face imperious and his unmodified eye a deep blue.

  He was, Ketta decided, quite attractive. If you liked that kind of thing.

  "Iconoclast-First Class Matteus Godolkin," she said, as she approached. "Surely you must have known your heresy would catch up with you sooner or later."

  "Always." His voice was a deep growl. There was a trace of accent to it. She wondered what world he had once called home. Whether or not he remembered it.

  She couldn't remember hers.

  He looked broken, hanging there on his chains. Ketta found that, despite everything she had vowed, everything she believed, she couldn't hate this man.

  He had been bested in combat by a being so lethal that Ketta herself had almost died fighting it. Enslaved by a supernatural power beyond his control. When he had finally escaped her he had come here, to this place, in search of peace. Instead, he had found a living nightmare.

  Now, after all these months, the Blasphemy was no more. Godolkin was utterly free of her, only to be taken prisoner by his own people.

  It was a horrible irony. Godolkin had never, and would never, be free. He was a slave from start to finish.

  "Godolkin," she began. "In a short while the dropship will be flight-capable again. We cannot get you and your companion aboard while you are chained to these frames because the landing spine has been damaged. So we will need to free you."

  "And your point is?"

  "My point, Het Godolkin, is that if you or your mutant friend try anything funny, I'll have you both staked through the legs. The landing craft has no light-drive, as you well know. We might get picked up on the way back to Shalem, or we might not. Six weeks is a long time to spend with staking pins through your thigh-bones."

  Godolkin raised his head. She heard the metal frame creaking. "And do you think that you will be able to get away in time, agent? You felt the second psychic attack as strongly as I did. You know the Mindfeeder is waking up. Do you wish to be in the air when the next attack comes?"

  "And where would you rather be?" she snorted. "This creature is nothing more than an alien with psionic powers. If it's been given a taste for human brains by these fools, that only makes it all the more pitiful. We'll get away from here whether it's awake or not, and then return with enough firepower to turn this moon molten again. Deal with it like the Accord has dealt with every other alien species." She put her face quite close to his. "Goodbye Mindfeeder. Goodbye Saint Scarlet."

  "And goodbye Admiral Antonia, it would seem," said Judas Harrow brightly.

  That stung. Ketta had lost more than one friend on this forsaken rock. "Have a care, mutant. You might well be staying. I've not made up my mind yet."

  "Hmm, a choice between being murdered here, or being taken back to Shalem for public execution. I'm afraid I don't see much benefit in either, Het."

  "Depends on the state I leave you in. I might simply stake you to a wall and leave you to starve. Or fall prey to the monster when it awakes. Tell me, Judas Harrow, do you think it will get hungry enough to open your skull on its own, if there is no one to do the job for it?" She turned away, abruptly tired of browbeating prisoners. It wasn't worthy of her.

  Sickened at herself, she stalked away to check on the dropship again.

  * * * *

  Within a few minutes, the pilot called Ketta on the comm and told her that he was ready to try taking off. "I'd get everyone into a safe area, Het Major. If there is one. This could go badly wrong."

  "Please try to assure it doesn't, pilot. For all our sakes."

  She had two of the shocktroopers burn through the chains holding Godolkin and Harrow to their frames, while the rest covered them. One false move, and the heretics would have been crippled by bolter fire. Luckily for them, they had decided to go quietly. Her threats must have been enough.

  Little of the courtyard remained and Ketta had seen the way it collapsed. She decided to get everyone outside, through the main gates and onto the Serpent Path. She'd told the pilot to extend the landing spine as much as possible and remain hovering with it close to the ground: a difficult piece of flight work, but one that she hoped he'd be capable of.

  The alternative was to climb into the ship while it was on the ground, and be inside it while it took off. Personally, Major Ketta would rather have had a chance to run if things started to go awry.

  She led the group out; a couple of shocktroopers behind her, then the three prisoners, and the other four troopers at the rear. As soon as they were all out of the gate, she signalled the pilot.

  The fusion drives kicked in with a throaty whine. Power fed through dampers into the grav-lift system, and the landing craft shifted on its bed of debris. Ketta heard masonry sliding back down into the courtyard, slamming into the dropship's armour.

  She found she was holding her breath.

  The craft came up, over the top of the wall. She saw it slide sideways through the air as the port wing scraped down over the rubble pile, then it righted. The grav-lifters were kicking bits of stone and plaster everywhere.

  The ship turned in the air and edged out of the courtyard. Ketta almost felt like cheering.

  Next to her, one of the shocktroopers made a peculiar sound, as though he had started to say something and then cut it off. She glanced at him, ready to rebuke the man for giving in to emotion, and saw that half his head was missing. He toppled.

  A shot whined past her, another clipped her shoulder armour, sending her stumbling. "We're under attack!"

  The shots were coming from the monastery. "It's the attendants," one of the troopers snapped. "They have weapons."

  "Really! You think?" Ketta hauled out her plasma carbine and began firing back through the gate. She shot an attendant in the head, splashing him apart from the neck up, and blew another's guts three metres past his backbone. "Return fire! You two, cover the prisoners! Stake them if they move!"

  Attendants, wild with fear, were scrambling out into the courtyard. From what Ketta could see, only a couple of them had weapons, slender gauss-rifles, but they were making good use of them. Another shot hissed past her head.

  What had they
been doing with guns in a holy retreat?

  The landing craft was above her, blocking out the orange glow of Mandus. She could feel the shivering weight of the grav-field as it came down.

  She glanced back. The dropship's landing-spine was down, leaving the upper part of the ship looking eviscerated. Most of its bulk was in the huge box-like ark at the end of the spine—retracted, this was the belly of the drop-ship.

  The ark was down, held horizontal, hatches gaping. The pilot was holding the ship as steady as he could, but the loss of the landing gyros was making things difficult. The vessel was wavering up and down by a metre or more, the ark occasionally bouncing down off the ground. No way she could have had the heretics loaded into that.

  "Fall back! In twos, covering fire from burners!"

  Two of the troopers stood shoulder to shoulder at the gate and opened up with their incinerators. Twin streams of fire erupted back into the courtyard, washing it with flame. Attendants, caught in the blast, shrieked as the burners cooked the flesh off their bones.

  Ketta stood next to the ark. Two troopers went in, jumping aboard and racing to the back, covering the doorway. Godolkin and Harrow were next. "Get in!" Ketta snapped. "Or you'll die where you stand—your choice!"

  They each stood with their hands clasped as if in prayer, locked together and to their necks with Iconoclast binders. For a moment it looked like the mutant was going to make a break for it, but Godolkin stilled him with a glare. A heartbeat later, they were on.

  Shots were still ringing past the ark. The burners hadn't entirely scoured the monastery. Ketta ordered the remaining Iconoclasts into the dropship and scrambled aboard last. She slapped the emergency linker, set just inside the hatch, with the heel of her hand. "Go!"

  The ark rose in a tortured whine of motors, the ship wallowing. Ketta closed the hatch, seeing the foamy surface of Lavannos falling away. It was one of the nicest things she had ever seen.

  There was a series of metallic clatters as the ark locked into position, turning the landing craft into one solid shape again. A hatch slid open, connecting it to the cockpit, and Ketta stuck her head through. "Pilot, get us out of here."

  "I am trying, major."

  Ketta almost panicked. "Try harder!"

  The ship pitched wildly sideways.

  The drives were screaming. Ketta rolled out of the hatch and fell uncontrollably across the ark, slamming heavily into the port wall. Her head connected sharply with the metal, and lights danced in her eyes. Towards the back of the ark, shouting erupted.

  Godolkin was free of his cuffs.

  Ketta groped for her carbine. She saw the heretic slam the head of one of her troopers into the wall, shattering his skull, and in an instant Godolkin had the weapon off his arm. Staking pins slammed out in a chattering stream, catching two more troopers and hammering them across the ark. Two others were already unconscious from the fall. The last one had Godolkin in his sights.

  The wing of the dropship hit the ground. The craft slewed wildly around, flinging the trooper off his feet. With the holy weapon covering his right arm and the bulk of his armour hampering his left, there was no way he could stop himself from falling back across the ark. A staking pin found his throat before he hit the far wall.

  Godolkin was racing across the pitching, heaving deck towards her.

  She tried to pick the carbine up, but he was too fast, slapping it from her hand. He raised the bolter.

  It flared. Pain flooded Ketta's entire left side. She screamed, her fingers clawing at the staking pin that had appeared in her shoulder, fixing her solidly to the deck.

  He aimed the bolter at her face. "The restraint key."

  "Go to hell!"

  "I've just left there. Do you wish to return with me?"

  "She's dead, Godolkin! Give it up!"

  "I still feel her teeth in me, major. She lives. Now, one last time—the key."

  Ketta writhed around the pain. "Curse you, heretic! On my belt, crypt-code 'holy fool'."

  "Apt." Godolkin took the key and tapped in its code. The broken remains of one cuff fell off his wrist. A few seconds later Judas Harrow ran past him, thermocowl flapping around his knees, stopping to scoop up Ketta's carbine.

  The mutant darted to the hatch, poked the carbine inside. "Pilot, I suggest you lower this box."

  She heard the pilot call out to her. "Major? Shall I—"

  "Yes! Drop the cursed thing. If they want to go, let them go!" Her vision was wavering. Blood was slicking around her injured shoulder. Her altered biochemistry had stopped her bleeding to death, but she was still critically injured.

  The ark began to descend. Ketta slumped back, holding the end of the pin. Godolkin and Harrow were at the hatch. As soon as it opened, they jumped free.

  "'Major?" That was the pilot again, over the internal linker. "Your orders?"

  "Raise the ark," she coughed. "Then take us up. And try not to crash this time."

  There was a sudden movement at the back of the ark. Ketta twisted herself up to see. The abbot was on his feet, stuffing something into his mouth past the breath-mask. As he saw her, he began to run towards the hatch.

  "Not you too," Ketta snarled. She grabbed the end of the staking pin and, with an agonised strength, tore it free of the deck and her own flesh.

  The abbot was standing at the hatch rim. The landing craft had bounced up on its faltering drives, and the drop was too much for him. Ketta drew her good arm back, and flipped the staking pin into his back.

  It took him in the spine, dead centre, pinning his robe to his flesh. He stumbled back, turned halfway around, and fell on his face. His hands scrabbled weakly at the deck.

  "Pilot," she grated. "Immediate dust-off. Get us in the air now!"

  The ark began to rise again. The ship tilted forwards and Ketta saw the abbot trying to crawl towards her. He reached out imploringly, but by doing so took one hand from the deck and loosened his grip. He started to slide out of the hatch, leaving a track of blood on the deck as he did so. "Help me," he shrieked.

  "Help yourself."

  Just before the hatch doors met, he was gone.

  Ketta felt the ark lock into place. There was a groan behind her as one of the surviving, but stunned shock-troopers started to come round. "Pilot?"

  "Yes, Het Major?"

  "It's all gone really wrong. In a minute, one of the troopers will ask you for a medical kit. Please let him know where it is."

  "Thy will be done, major. Are you all right?"

  "Not really." She flopped back on the deck, quite hard. "I think I'm going to pass out now."

  She was right.

  16

  Cerebrophage

  Godolkin still had the holy weapon. It was huge, a flattened egg of metal that enveloped his right arm to the elbow, the forward end a gaping mass of barrels and sensors. It must have been heavy; as far as Harrow knew it would normally link into Iconoclast armour, with power-assist units helping bear the weight. Godolkin was carrying it one-handed as though it was a pistol.

  He looked up. The landing craft was wavering away, more steady than it had been, but still unable to gain much height. "Will they make it?"

  "They might." Godolkin had aimed the weapon at the craft for a while, but had obviously decided to hold fire. The bolter was a fairly short-range piece anyway. "Even in this low gravity, they will have to make several orbits before leaving the atmosphere."

  Harrow understood enough about starship operations to know that the dropship's pilot couldn't engage the main drives while there was any more than a wisp of air in the tubes. He'd blow the engines apart if he tried. "Just as long as they don't try strafing Hunter as they go past."

  "Something tells me they might have other things on their minds." Godolkin strode past him, moving easily in the light gravity, towards a crumpled mass of robes a short distance away. They had both seen the abbot fall, from what would have been a fatal distance on any normal-sized world. Even on Lavannos, he had built up quite a speed
before impact.

  Harrow followed the Iconoclast. The abbot, he saw with some surprise, was still alive.

  The man was twisted horribly on the cold ground, his shattered legs facing almost completely in the wrong direction. He must have been in little pain from his injuries, though. Harrow could see that a staking pin had parted his spine.

  Under his breath-mask the man's mouth was full of blood and greyish fragments. Some kind of dried food, like a fungus. There was more in his fist; Harrow reached down and parted the man's fingers, took a slice of what he had been eating from him, and almost sniffed it before he remembered his own mask.

  It was thin, and flat, and oddly wrinkled around one edge. Harrow frowned, holding it up to the light.

  And dropped it with a cry of horror. The abbot, it would seem, had not been giving everything he collected to the Mindfeeder.

  The abbot chuckled weakly. "It isn't to everyone's taste," he whispered. "Even crumbled in tea, it affects different people in different ways."

  Godolkin was grimacing. "You fed me that foul brew?"

  "It helped the dreams."

  The Iconoclast put the barrel of the holy weapon very close to the abbot's face. "Say your prayers, monster."

  "Go ahead, Matteus. Pull your trigger." The man grinned, bubbles of blood soaking up between his teeth. "He'll be awake soon. Hungry. He couldn't live here, not properly, not be awake in our reality, the stars weren't right. But we kept him ticking over, five hundred years of sacrifice."

  "Did you think he'd be grateful?"

  "Oh yes, Iconoclast, as grateful as a man is to the bacteria in his gut…" He coughed, spattering the inside of the mask with blood and fragments of dried brain. "So go ahead and shoot. And then await his glories!"

  Godolkin reached down and picked the abbot up by the front of his robes. The man gave a weak cry of pain. "If you think that I would desecrate a staking pin in your flesh, abbot, you are sadly mistaken."

  And with one hand, he hurled the man through the air.

  Harrow saw the abbot fly past him, in a high arc, slam back onto the ground and bounce towards a crater. He clawed at the stone for a moment, but it was too smooth. He slid down into the depths without a cry.