The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  He spread his hands, helplessly. "I'm sorry. I have to find her."

  Her belongings were bundled into a small pack. Apparently she didn't need much to survive, even on Ashkelon. "Don't think that just because Godolkin's not here, he's still alive. He's more than likely just a wet smear on someone's launch pad, half a world away. Your Saint too, if she escaped via the same route." She lifted the pack and swung it over her shoulder. "No, you're right. It wouldn't work."

  "I'm sorry," he said again.

  "So am I. You know I can't let you follow me."

  Here it comes, Harrow thought. He wondered if he had a chance of reaching his carbine before Ketta got him first, but quickly realised that he didn't. "Make it swift, agent."

  "Oh, don't be so melodramatic," she said, and shot him down.

  The blow was hard, but not lethal. Harrow came to his senses a few minutes later, with water hitting his face.

  In the moment between oblivion and wakefulness he was treated to a quite delicious delusion - that Durham Red, the Scarlet Saint herself, had returned to him. She was sitting close by, glass of cold water in hands, dipping her fingers into it and sprinkling droplets over him. "Wake up, sleepyhead," she breathed.

  His eyes flickered open and she was gone.

  The water was coming down hard, in fat, fast gobbets. He had to shield his face with his hand as he sat up; if any of those watery missiles had struck him in an open eye it would been painful at best, possibly damaging. If this was rain, he decided, his head spinning, he regretted not bringing a hat.

  But it was neither rain nor Durham Red with a glass of water. It was coming down off the trees, from high up in the canopy. And not only water, but leaves, twigs, small creatures, all pouring down on him from on high.

  The forest was being shaken.

  Harrow staggered to his feet. If it hadn't been for the clump of detritus on his head he would have been convinced Ketta's blow had set him rocking, but he was more stable than the trees and vines around him. The ground beneath his feet was convulsing steadily, a rhythmic quaking, like a giant's heartbeat hammering under the forest's skin. It was making the wildlife shriek, the canopy sway.

  Not far away, a tree must have lost its roots to the shaking. Harrow heard the groan and howl of overstressed wood, the succession of rustling crashes as the trunk battered its way groundwards, crushing everything beneath it. He looked about wildly, suddenly aware that any one of the trees around him might suffer the same fate, flattening him if he was too close. Not for the first time, the forest was a dangerous place to be.

  But as soon as the thought presented itself, the shaking began to subside. Within a few seconds it had abated entirely, marked only by a slowing fall of canopy water and the fading screams of the animals.

  He stood, in the ruins of Ketta's campsite, breathing hard and wondering what to do next. If he stayed where he was, he reasoned, there was a very good chance of being pulverised by falling trees if the forest erupted again. He had seen no evidence of such activity; the forest had seemed remarkably stable before the event. But if Harrow knew anything about seismic quakes, it was that one tends to beget another.

  Besides, the campsite wasn't far from the clearing. The other Omegas must have known that Hermas had been there, although where he was, was a subject for conjecture. Harrow had thought about waiting between the towers in the hope of following the same path as Godolkin, or maybe even Durham Red, but there was little logic in it. It might have been days before the towers activated again. If exposure didn't finish him, the Omegas certainly would.

  No, his only real option was to keep moving. But where to?

  Crimson Hunter was too far away, and Godolkin had taken most of the survival equipment with him into the fire. Even if he was mad enough to attempt the journey, he'd never make it. Ketta had taken the dataslate, and with it his only compass. He'd be lucky if he could even make it back as far as the ruined town, but what would be there for him if he did? An empty courtyard, some bones, and a slow death from starvation. Ketta would be long gone.

  As far as he could see, he had only one option. He could make contact with Ketta again, try to appeal to her better nature, and hitch a lift back to Crimson Hunter. Once there he could try to rig a long-range distress transmission, and hope that some Harvesters or sympathetic Tenebrae picked him up before an Iconoclast patrol found him.

  If he had the ship up and running, he could use it to search for Durham Red. After all, that was what he had originally bought it for.

  His choice, then, was made for him. He retrieved his carbine from where Ketta had left it, found where she had hidden the magazine - a further delaying tactic on her part - and set off towards the spot she had marked on her map. He knew enough about the workings of the dataslate to read her diagram as a location as soon as he saw it.

  The day was still young and the sun burned low in the sky. The shafts of misty sunlight it threw between the trees were further marked by the dust shaken into the air. Harrow aligned himself with the trees, readied the carbine, and walked into the forest.

  His destination wasn't far away. Maybe, if he hurried, he would find the Omega ship before Ketta did.

  The sun was higher and the day hotter than any Harrow had so far experienced. The heat made the perspiration run down his face and his chest in streams, gluing his shirt and jacket to his back.

  Not all his sweating was done at the sun's behest, though. Fear played its part. He was walking straight towards the greatest concentration of Omega warriors on Ashkelon, hoping to beg help from an Iconoclast special agent - put so badly, the thought almost stopped him in his tracks.

  A distant rumble, far off among the trees, lent him speed once more. Another quake, perhaps, or the launch of Ketta's daggership - he wasn't sure which, but either could result in his death. He increased his pace, battering down any undergrowth in his path, skirting any patches that would defeat his hands or the butt of the carbine. Ketta had taken his vibrablade.

  The track he was on had climbed steadily for the past thirty minutes, exhausting him still further. Even in the clearing it had been difficult to gauge the topography of the forest. From inside it, where the furthest he could see through the greenery was only a few metres at a time, it was quite impossible to determine what ground features lay in his path. He might have skirted mountains and never known it.

  It was no surprise when the end of the track almost became the finish of Judas Harrow, too.

  There was a bed of vines in his path, pulpy things as thick as his thigh that curled and corkscrewed their way out of the ground to wrap around nearby trees, protecting their soft innards with an arsenal of needles and thorns. Harrow couldn't see a way past them and so had resigned himself to fighting his way through, turning the carbine around and using its folding stock as a blunt axe. The vines had put up a fight, but his ferocity had been a match for them and within a minute or two Harrow found his way clear. He stepped through, feeling pleased with himself and promptly fell off a cliff.

  He yelled, twisting as he tumbled, losing the carbine but gaining a grip on a smashed length of vine. For a few seconds he hung there, staring at the rough rock face of the cliff, trying to get a purchase with the toes of his boots, until his weight proved too much for the vine and, as if in revenge for the beating it had taken, it sheared through and let him drop. Palms full of needles, he fell.

  The drop was frightening, but not all that far. Still, Harrow would have broken a limb if he hadn't landed in water.

  The impact knocked the breath from him, and the shock of cold water almost stilled his heart. Struggling, choking, he fought his way back up to the surface, lungs aflame, until his head broke through and he dragged in a gasping, shuddering breath. His clothing was not made of a fabric that absorbed moisture in great quantities, and he was able to tread water for a moment or two while he got his bearings.

  The section of sodden vine drifted past him. He eyed it sourly as it bobbed away.

  There was a nar
row, steeply shelving beach at the base of the cliff. Harrow swam towards it, his feet finding purchase when he was a few metres from shore. He waded up the slope, until he left the water entirely, then turned to try and make sense of his surroundings.

  Something must have been wrong with Ketta's map, or his interpretation of it. He hadn't found the Omega base camp. He'd found a lake.

  It had been a crater once, back in the distant past, and a huge one. Harrow looked across two or three kilometres of open water to the far shore, where a cliff of similar proportions to the one he had fallen from rose up. To his right loomed a dizzying wall of rock, jagged and sheer - if he tumbled down that, he thought with a start of horror, he would dash his brains out on the water's surface.

  Over to the left, though, things seemed friendlier. The side of the crater must have collapsed in that quadrant, spilling itself into a series of low hills, now covered with forest. The shoreline widened out there, too.

  Harrow didn't waste time looking for his carbine. It was in the lake somewhere, and while it was quite waterproof it was also heavy. He'd never find it. Instead he began walking along the shoreline, heading towards the wider part.

  He had been walking for no more than a few minutes before he heard the rumbling again. It was ahead of him, this time; there was no mistaking its source, because a great cloud of flying creatures billowed up from the forest on the low edge of the crater, their distant cries mingling with the seismic growl to form a sound that set Harrow's teeth vibrating.

  The rumbling had become a rougher sound, a sharper one. Harrow stopped where he was, eyes wide, as the forested hills began to shake, a juddering vibration so fast that it blurred his view. It was nothing like the heartbeat shaking of the quake he had felt back at the campsite. This was the surface of Ashkelon quivering until it fell apart.

  Chunks of tree began to fly upwards, joined moments later by a fog of debris. And then, when Harrow thought that the hills themselves would start to fly apart, something erupted from the forest with a cacophony that had every flier leaping from every tree, their screams filling the crater.

  A shard of black stone, as big as a cathedral spire, crashed upwards through the canopy, tottered for an awful moment, and then fell towards Harrow.

  It goaned as it fell, trailing arcs of dust and pulverised soil. Harrow didn't move - if the shard missed him, he would live, and if it came close he would die. There was no running from it. All he could do was stand and witness its fall.

  It hit the lake a hundred yards from him, blasting a wall of water into the sky.

  The water moved him more than the rock. Harrow ducked away from it as the wall came back down, hitting him and battering him sideways across the shoreline. It didn't knock him off his feet, but it soaked him to the skin a second time.

  He cursed. His clothes had only just started to dry.

  Behind him, the lake was still rocking, waves crashing backwards and forwards as though chasing each other to destruction. The hills had stopped their convulsions when the shard appeared, but the surface of the water seemed to have taken on their violence. Harrow backed away, still too close to the cliff wall to go far, his head ringing from the sound of the quake, heart leaping in his chest as he contemplated what a further impact below the lake's surface would do to him.

  The water was beginning to surge upwards. Gas, he thought. Some titanic reservoir of toxic fumes must have been released from the lakebed, breaking as he watched.

  The water continued to seethe and its swell kept getting bigger, far beyond the point at which it could have supported itself. Smaller streams ran off it in sparkling rivulets, as if from glass or something even more transparent.

  Like a ship with a shadow web.

  "Sacred rubies," he whispered. The Omegas had hidden their ship under the lake, and now they were trying to lift off before any more rock spires came down on them.

  He started to run along the shoreline, still watching the ship rise. He saw more domes break the surface, shimmering, water pooling in the air between them, then slabs and planes, the cylinders of great drive nacelles. The ship was a big one, corvette-sized or greater.

  It wasn't alone, either. Three smaller vessels accompanied it - they were heavy interceptors, oddly shaped things twice the size of Crimson Hunter.

  By the time he had made it to the shard's flank the Omega corvette was out of the water, shedding tonnes of spray. It couldn't engage its main drives yet, or its thrusters. Grav-lifters would work when they were submerged, but if the Omega captain tried to power up a thruster while it was full of water he might cause a steam explosion. If he was lucky he might blow the tube clear, but if not, then the superheated steam could take the whole assembly off.

  Antimat fire carved up from the vessel's lucent, glittering flanks.

  Harrow ducked, but the fire wasn't aimed it him. It snarled overhead, its heat ripping the air, streams of it converging from invisible turrets. Water scattered as the interceptors started to turn.

  There was only one thing the Omegas could be shooting at. Harrow covered his head and forced himself against the wet side of the shard.

  Ketta's daggership howled across the lake, its drives torching out great streams of flame, weapons spitting ragged bolts of blinding energy. The agent must have started her drives while she was still on the courtyard, letting the air in the tubes heat up before she turned the power up. She'd had time to prepare. The Omegas, jolted into action by the falling shard, had not.

  The daggership thundered past Harrow and under the corvette's belly, strafing it from wing to wing.

  Deafening explosions tore downwards, vomiting fire and debris into the lake. As the rain of hot metal hit the water steam blasted up, meeting the fires that were falling down, the whole mess surrounded by coruscating patterns of colour as the shadow web began to fail. Harrow saw the ship flashing, flickering into view, sections of it still invisible but others losing their camouflage, turrets still chasing the darting daggership.

  There was no way this could end well. Harrow abandoned his hiding place and ran, heading up the shoreline as fast as his legs would carry him.

  More explosions sounded behind him, but he didn't look back. The Omega vessel, for all its might, was being ripped apart by Ketta's modified gunship. With their drives full of water, neither it nor the interceptors stood a chance.

  Harrow had been running for a minute, maybe two, when there was a blast from the lake so powerful it knocked him flat.

  He rolled over, in time to see the corvette roar overhead, its shadow covering him, blocking out the sun as it careered away. It was sliding in the air, burning as it went, its drives ablaze, its turrets still spitting fire like a severed vein spits blood. Fully visible for the first time, it thundered past him and out into the forest, losing height all the time. An interceptor exceeded its velocity, flickering with damaged camouflage, and blew up in mid-air. Seconds later, the corvette touched the forest and shattered.

  Pieces bigger than Ketta's entire ship flew through the sky, comet tails of fire and smoke following their arcing paths down to the trees. Secondary explosions began to hammer out from behind the hills, battering Harrow in waves as Ketta's ship screamed across the canopy.

  One of the surviving interceptors tried to follow her, its drives stuttering with steam detonations, but a whirling section of the corvette came too close, and batted it out of the air. Harrow saw it strike the canopy and crash through, rolling to a messy halt among the trunks.

  And then silence - save the dull rush of forest fires, and the crack of debris surrendering itself to heat.

  Shaking, ears bleeding, Harrow forced himself to sit up, then to stand.

  Everywhere he could see, the forest had gained new pathways, burning, pulverised tunnels through the undergrowth, where pieces of the Omega's hidden warship had tumbled to earth.

  Maybe, when the fires were out, he would use those paths. There didn't seem to be anywhere else to go.

  Some time later, Harrow
wasn't sure how long, Ketta came back.

  Her daggership drifted down in front of him, as he climbed the first of the hills where the shard had emerged. She didn't land it, just kept hovering a few metres above the ground. It must have been set to automatic, because within a minute or two a side hatch opened, and Ketta put her head out.

  "Hello, mutant," she called down.

  Despite himself, Harrow put up a hand and waved. He was too tired, too assaulted by events, to do much more.

  She crouched in the hatchway, looking down at him with a slight smile on her lips. "I wasn't expecting to see you here. I thought you'd have stayed with the towers."

  "I thought about that," he called back. "But it wouldn't have worked. Too much company."

  "Don't think it's all gone. There was a skeleton crew on those ships, nothing more. The forest is still swarming with them, and there'll be more waiting for me elsewhere. Hermas wasn't an idiot."

  "Unlike me?"

  She appeared to shrug, although it might have been the downdraft from the daggership's grav-lifters, catching her clothes. "You're no idiot, Harrow. I'm beginning to think quite highly of you."

  "Really?"

  "Freedom does strange things to a girl. Anyway, have this." She threw something down to him.

  Harrow caught it before it hit the ground. It was a small plastic case, no larger than a volume of scripture. "What is it?"

  "A gift for your saint, if you happen to see her again. I picked it up on Biblos. Oh, and you can tell her she won't hear from me, either. I'm done hunting mutants."

  "She won't believe you."

  "I know. Harrow, I've got to be away. You should too - there are fissures opening up in this world's crust, not far from here. I don't know what's happening on this planet, but it's nothing good. Get away while you can."

  "That might be difficult."

  "Not really. Head northeast, and keep your wits about you."