The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  "Blasphemy..."

  She trotted over to join him, pushing her way through the throng of scuttling workers, then finally she saw.

  There was a window, a towering wall of glass like the one she had seen up in Losen's domain. Through it she could see the mottled landscape of Magadan, its swamps and forests, the low hills rising in the far distance, wreathed in their impenetrable mists.

  Above this, up in the clouds, dark motes were swarming away. Every flight harbour must have been emptying itself of airboats, every schooner and skiff filled with escapees wondering if their power cores would go critical before the diseases killed them.

  Neither would actually happen - although what lay in store for the Magadani out in the wilds was unknown. Things were going to be different for them, that was for sure.

  She shook herself. "Godolkin, stop gawping. We've got to go, okay?"

  "I concur. I suggest we take one of these vessels aloft, and wait for the Magadani to activate the Logic Gate."

  "What? It's not working now?"

  "When it is, Blasphemy, you will know it."

  She took a deep breath. It was going to be close. "Okay. Pick a ship."

  The hangar was in turmoil. Techs and sylphs were running everywhere, trying to avoid the vast crowds of Domini invading the strata. Fights were breaking out, sylph against sylph, citizen against citizen. A panic was ripping through the Grand Keep, and eating it away from the inside.

  It was horrifying. For every Magadani taking off from the flight harbours, another ten were unable to get there in time or too frightened of the diseases outside. It was little wonder. They had grown up in fear of the tainted surface of their world, had its lethality drummed into them from childhood. Even with the Gothking's voice hammering out through the internal sounders, few could bring themselves to trust him.

  Of those who did, a considerable number seemed to be in the hangar deck, trying to fight their way aboard the starships berthed there. The situation was so disorganised that Red and Godolkin were able to break into a ship before anyone knew what they were doing. It was only when Red had engaged the thrusters and torn the ship free of its moorings that a few shots tapped at the hull.

  The ship was small, a bullet of burnished bronze, its cockpit fronted by a glass canopy. Red watched the deck in awe as she took the ship around in a wide curve. "Christ, look at this. They're going crazy."

  "Fear turns men into beasts, mistress."

  She nodded, turning her attention back to the controls. "So," she growled, taking the ship around on a second circuit. "Are they going to turn this thing on, or what?"

  "Have you considered, mistress, the ramifications of doing so?" Godolkin was still glaring down at the rampaging Domini below. "The universe will fill with homeless Magadani."

  "Well, I hope they've got enough sense to head outside the Accord. Can you imagine that lot between the Iconoclasts and the Tenebrae?"

  Godolkin grimaced. "I fear for my people."

  The Gate still hadn't come on. Red was taking the ship around in a third circle when the hangar shook.

  Even from the air, she felt it. It was though the entire ceiling had dropped a metre, compressing the inner walls of the Keep, sending vast sheets of metal splitting away from the hangar's sides and toppling down into the crowds below. One scythed down into a fuel store, and seconds later was blown clear across the stratum by a billowing fireball.

  Fuel canisters began to detonate, careening upwards on columns of flame.

  "Godolkin! We're too damn late!" Red hauled on the controls, swinging the ship around as a piece of ceiling the size of a house broke free in front of her and went spiralling down onto the deck. It flattened the wing of a starship that was just taking off, slewing it into its neighbours. A drum of blazing fuel shot past her in the other direction. "The Keep's coming apart!"

  "The Gate," he snapped in reply. "It's activated!"

  Harsh light had flooded the hangar.

  For a second Red thought the light was from more fires, but this wasn't the yellow-orange of burning fuel. The downwardly inclined towers had opened into complex jigsaws of blue light and silver machinery, and were spilling out beams of sapphire brilliance. At their point of intersection a cube of golden, glassy light was expanding, sprouting smaller cubes from its faces, which sprouted more in turn. In seconds, it billowed into a great cloud of shining, revolving facets.

  "Blasphemy, the Gate is open."

  Red sat, dry-mouthed. "You came through that?"

  "I did, although my journey was unshielded."

  "Okay. Let's get out of here. I don't want to be encoded any more." She gunned the engines.

  In front of her, the hangar ceiling detached itself with a shriek of tearing metal. A gravity nullifier dropped through it to explode against the deck, and then the air was a storm of debris.

  The Keep was coming down.

  There was no way to get to the Gate now. Red swung the bronze ship around, opening up the drives in a searing column of plasma, and dove straight at the windows she had looked through earlier.

  There was no glass in the frames. It lay in heaps inside the hangar, or was already spiralling down to the surface of Magadan. Red saw the gaping openings rush towards her, reach out to brush her with the last few shards they possessed, and then they were gone.

  The bronze ship raced away from the Grand Keep, as the entire edifice began to tear itself apart.

  20. THREE TALES OF THE FALL

  The Gothking had many eyes. The ones he had been born with were quite useless to him now, just pallid blebs of milky flesh drifting with him in his tank of nutrient, but there were thousands of others. Visula pickups all over the Keep were showing him the destruction he had wrought.

  If his own eyes had been working, he would have wept from them.

  He had seen the Grand Keep in the days when it was a few scattered towers, gradually roofed over to provide more shelter from Magadan's driving rains. He had overseen construction as the first gravity nullifiers came online, and the second stage began to be built above the first. He had watched the society of the Magadani form itself from the embittered remnants of his criminal empire, slowly growing into the advanced and ultimately debauched culture it had become. And although he hated what he had created with a passion, he loved it too. They had modelled themselves on his example. They were his children.

  And now their house was coming down around their ears.

  He had stopped shouting now. Everyone who could have left had done so; the flight harbours were empty, the hangar deck in turmoil. The Logic Gate had been activated, too late for many. That part of the Keep was beginning to collapse.

  Minutes were left to him, if that.

  He wondered if Durham Red and her Iconoclast companion had made it through the Gate. He hoped not. The surviving Magadani would be leaderless, lost in the swampy wilds of their encoded world. They could use someone like Durham Red to band them together, to start again.

  Maybe she would help them build another Logic Gate. After all, it needed an immortal to make it work.

  D'Isis could feel the vibrations of the Keep's structure now, riding up through the support braces beneath his tank. It heralded his own impending death, but he gloried in it. So much so that he failed to see Vaide Sorrelier running up the walkway towards him until the Domini was standing at the foot of his dais.

  "It's true, then," the man was gasping. His face was a riot of emotion: terror, triumph, nausea. "This is the almighty Magister, ruler of Magadan. A brain in a bubble."

  "Hello again, Vaide." D'Isis turned an eye or two towards the Domini. He could spare their vision. "I'm glad you're here. It will be nice to have some company at the end."

  "Oh, don't get used to it. I'm not staying. I just wanted to see you with my own eyes, before I left you to rot in this teetering junkpile."

  More fool you, thought D'isis, but he said nothing. "That's a shame. And we were getting on so well."

  "I saw the mutant run out
of here, with her slave. Did you tell her about me?"

  "About what you did to her? No, I spared her that." Up in the citadel of Trawden, a dozen of the Gothking's eyes died as a thousand tonnes of stone and metal sheared free of the main tower, ripping a great track down the side of the Keep. "It wouldn't have been fair. If she'd discovered that you were the one who sold her to the Osculem Cruentus, she'd have wanted to hunt you down and eviscerate you personally. The fact that she could never see you again would have infuriated her."

  "Don't be too sure. We might-" Sorrelier's face darkened for a moment. "What was that?"

  "What? I'm a little cut off in here."

  "I'm sure I heard something."

  What Sorrelier had heard was the Logic Gate, exploding into frenzied life above him. The decryption algorithms that formed it were unstable, thanks to the influence of Durham Red's DNA, and the Gate was beginning to fail. But not in the way that D'Isis had predicted. He had expected it to collapse in on itself almost immediately. Instead it was feeding off of its own energies, becoming a storm, a whirlwind that was eating the launch hangar from within.

  Spikes of decryption were starting to rip through the walls.

  Sorrelier must have felt that too. A look of panic crossed his features for a moment, replaced quickly by oily determination. "Time to be gone."

  "Oh, say it's not so," D'Isis chuckled. "We've so much to discuss. Please, sit a spell. Take the weight off."

  The Domini was already starting away. The Gothking watched him go, counting his footsteps.

  He got to fourteen before the end came.

  It was very quick, at the finish, although not as quick as Sorrelier might have liked. Through the Gothking's multiple eyes it seemed that a number of things happened almost simultaneously.

  The structures supporting the five citadels failed as Sorrelier took his fourteenth step, their titanic weight immediately crushing the stratum below before the immense towers, each massing millions of tonnes, began to fall away from each other. The support braces below the Magister's tank shattered, the mighty weight they supported splintering immediately, exploding out through the host of voltage regulators surrounding them. And at the same moment as the power finally failed, the launch hangar collapsed, the strata above it imploding as they crashed downwards through the ceiling, taking the Gate towers with them.

  Uncontained, the Logic Gate erupted. Tendrils of raw decryption lashed out in every direction. One of them came down through the ceiling of the Magister's chamber, and swept through Vaide Sorrelier.

  D'Isis saw it happen, through multiple eyes, in the final fractions of a second before the Keep came down on top of him. He saw the Domini unfold, shrieking, his body expanding into a profusion of surfaces: skin, bone, brain. Just for that last, endless second he was less a man and more an origami figure in glistening red paper, opening up and out until he was as thinly spread as the air.

  The Gothking's final thought, before the untold billions of tonnes of masonry above him hammered down, was how substantial, how loud, Sorrelier's screams still remained.

  Judas Harrow had just reached the Omega ship as the inferno began. He had been tracking it along the path its impact had carved through the forest, trekking towards the point where Ketta's daggership had executed that jaunty flip of its wings before vanishing into the sky.

  He had been able to see the vessel for some time, and had slowed his pace as he realised how intact it still was. It had been batted out of the sky by a piece of debris from the Omega corvette, and had slammed down hard in the forest, rolling for some time before it came to rest. But the armoured shell seemed intact, the bulbous pressure cylinder undamaged, the angular mass of pipework that fed the main drives barely scored. It was a worrying testament to the resilience of Omega technology.

  Harrow could see, as he got closer, how the name of the ship's owners had been stencilled along one flank. "Moon of blood," he cursed softly. "How arrogant can you get?"

  Behind him, the jungle turned to fire.

  He ducked on reflex, and whirled around, bringing the carbine up, but there were no Omegas behind him. The wash of orange across the forest wasn't the burst of cleansing fire that he feared, but a cube-shaped blaze.

  As he watched, stunned, the edges of it billowed out above the canopy.

  Arcs of raw voltage were spilling upwards and outwards like captive lightning. Whatever they touched flashed into fragments, and they were touching an awful lot. In moments the air around the clearing was a tornado of scorched wood and tumbling tree-boles.

  This wasn't the same as before. Harrow began to retreat backwards towards the Omega ship.

  The outlines of the cubes were ragged, swelling like thunderclouds. Harrow felt the warm metal of the ship at the same moment the inferno seemed to intensify, swell, and then vomit something vast into the sky.

  It wasn't a starship, not this time. No space vessel surging upwards on a column of flame.

  This was part of a building.

  Harrow could do nothing except stand and stare as the immense structure came arcing through the air towards him. It was half a tower, a curve of glossy blue stone, unfeasibly vast. As it got close, its droning roar tearing the air, he could see the smooth side of it studded with thousands upon thousands of windows.

  The other side was a mess of masonry, but Harrow saw gigantic floors and decks poking out of the shell, stacked above each other and pouring debris down into the forest.

  The tower tumbled end over end, whirling through the sky. For a moment it blocked out the sun, and then it was gone. Seconds later it touched the ground, and the force of its destruction made the ground shake as badly as the seismic quakes earlier.

  Harrow scrambled to his feet, shaking pieces of forest out of his hair. The tower's fall had knocked him prone, and the sound of it was still beating his ears. Past the Omega ship huge chunks of stone were still bouncing and spinning away; towards the clearing, more masonry was spitting out of the inferno.

  It was raining skyscrapers. Harrow's stomach suddenly swooped with the realisation of what would happen should the next flying castle come any closer to where he stood.

  He still had the data pick. His fingers were shaking so much, so slick with sweat, that he dropped it the first couple of times he tried to use it. By the time he finally got the interceptor's hatch open, the sky was dark with stone.

  Durham Red's stolen ship was in the air when the Keep finally collapsed. She saw it happen through the side of the canopy - she had turned to circle the tower after leaving through the hangar windows.

  The destruction of the Keep happened with an agonising slowness, yet with impossible speed. When a great piece of Trawden tower detached itself from the rest of the citadel, it seemed to do so lazily, scraping downwards in an unhurried fashion. Then Red remembered that even that small part of the tower was probably a thousand metres tall, containing dozens of strata, and suddenly its destruction didn't seem so slow any more. The Grand Keep was shattering itself with incredible force.

  Chunks of outer wall, some the size of starships, were flung away from the main structure by the weight of the sections above. Red had to dive under one as it ripped through the air towards her. She looked across to see it carve a two-kilometre furrow in the swamp beyond.

  Godolkin had to grab the control board to steady himself as the bronze ship rocked. "Blasphemy, this is insane. We should get out of range before the entire Keep falls!"

  "Not yet."

  "What are you waiting for?"

  Red glared at him. "Just trust me, okay?"

  "Mistress, lead will become gold before that occurs."

  She couldn't help but grin at that. "Put it this way. I spent a long time wading through that rain-sodden sneckhole down there. If there's any chance of not spending the rest of my life dodging angry Magadani through the mud, I'll take it."

  "Should any more debris come that close, you will not have to... Blasphemy! The towers!"

  Red could already see
it. The five citadels had sheared free from the main body of the Keep, and were toppling. Most of them were spilling outwards. One was tumbling in on itself, the gravity nullifiers that had held it together now powerless to prevent it coming apart. It fell, in a dense cloud of pulverised stone and smoke, into the centre of the Keep. Any remaining scaffolds and construction machinery were wiped away in moments.

  As Red watched the other four citadels flower outwards, golden light burst from the centre of the Keep.

  The Logic Gate had billowed out as the hangar collapsed. Somehow it had become self-sustaining, feeding on itself and the titanic shards of stonework falling into it. The Keep was not only collapsing in on itself under the pull of gravity, but was being dragged into the Gate at the same time.

  Red gave a whoop of triumph. "That's it!"

  "Blasphemy, if you intend to enter that maelstrom, you are truly insane!"

  "You know I'm mad. You say it all the time."

  "Yes, but this time I mean it."

  Red swung the bronze ship around, and slammed the main drives to full thrust. "Too late. In we go."

  "I embrace death," Godolkin muttered. Red laughed out loud, and hammered the ship into the heart of the Logic Gate.

  The air between her and the Gate was filled with tumbling stones. Red began to twitch the controls, ducking under a giant slab, then swooping up and over half a stratum that spun past like a boomerang. Dust and pebbles were ringing off the hull, but she couldn't waste her attention on them. It was the pieces of stone slab the size of battleships that she needed to avoid.

  A stone column, bigger than those in the inner court, slammed into the port wing, and Red shouted, dragging on the controls so hard that she bent their levers. The ground welled up towards her, covered with tumbling, bouncing debris, and then dropped away. The Gate, twisting and pocked with fireballs, reared up ahead of her.

  The sky went dark. Red was flying directly under a citadel.