The Encoded Heart

by Peter J Evans

  She couldn't have guessed which one it was, and at that moment it didn't matter. All that Red could see was the storm of light in front of her, the sea of stone above. The tower was sagging as it fell, unable to hold itself together. The thousands of windows studding its curved flanks were dripping corpses.

  The bronze ship whirled through a hail of bodies, of stonework and furniture, trees and gantries and statues as it raced for the Gate.

  Red glanced down at her controls, then up at the falling tower. It was impossibly close. She could see the cracks in the stonework, the faces on the corpses falling from the portals.

  She wasn't going to make it.

  A gilded statue came down directly over the ship's back. Red cried out, feeling the vessel slide away from her, then slam back in the opposite direction as another chunk of stone came down on the wing. Then the ship was tumbling, spinning out of control, and all she could see out of the cockpit glass was darkness.

  And then, light.

  A tendril of the Logic Gate had swept them up, enveloped them in a storm of glassy polyhedra.

  The light vanished, leaving Red in absolute darkness. For an infinite moment she hung suspended, motionless, utterly without feeling. In the next instant she was pounded by a million jackhammers.

  The ship was shaking with incredible force, although she could neither see nor feel the vessel itself. All Red could experience was pain, an awful battering that seemed to fling her in every possible direction at once. It was so horribly violent that she thought she would come apart at the seams. Red tried to hold onto the chair arms, but couldn't feel her hands.

  She was dimly aware of someone screaming, and realised that it was probably her.

  A flash, at the back of her mind, sent cartwheels of light into the space between her eyes. The buffeting took on a new direction, over and over and through herself, then slamming into her again. It was a storm of motion, shot through with bolts of searing light and pain, one phase after another crashing into her like waves in a tempest.

  Just when she thought that her head would shatter, and her brain come flying through the wreckage to join all the other debris in the Gate, the light came back.

  Not just light, but the universe.

  Stars in their millions crowded in on her, worlds without end, without number. It wasn't one universe she was seeing, but many - suns overlaid upon suns, galaxies eclipsing themselves a million times over. An infinity of worlds, each one the same and yet each one subtly different. But in every one of these realities, bursting into her senses like hammer blows, there was one constant.

  It was terrifying. She saw what was out there, looking back on her with infinite eyes, and she howled.

  She was still howling when the jungle came up and hit her in the face.

  Somehow, they had survived the Logic Gate. Red wasn't awake to see what happened immediately after - the onslaught she had suffered, coupled with her hunger, exhaustion and injuries, had put paid to her senses for a while. She would find out later that Godolkin had dragged her out of the wreckage just seconds after the bronze ship had flipped out from between the towers and ploughed into the burning forest beyond. Just moments before the Logic Gate had expanded to a size and ferocity even greater than that she had seen swallow the Keep.

  It was still blazing an hour later, when the ship came to find them, adding its violence to multiple fires already burning in the forest. Red was conscious again by that time, mainly due to Godolkin. He had opened one of his veins for her, allowing the hot blood from his wrist to drip into her mouth while she lay insensible. It wasn't much. It wasn't even enough. But it sent her back to the land of the living, for a while.

  The ship that came for them wasn't one she recognised. It seemed to appear from nowhere, flickering into view as it hovered, wobbling, above the trees. Red initially put that down to her own addled state of mind, but Godolkin knew better. "That's an Omega vessel, a heavy interceptor. The shadow web has just disengaged."

  "We should get going, then." Red wondered how fast she could run, if at all. Godolkin shook his head.

  "I don't think so. Omegas are skilled warriors. Whoever is in control of that ship-" He broke off as the vessel wallowed, belly first, into the ground a few metres away, throwing up fountains of ash and soil. "-is not."

  A hatch opened in the ship's battered, bulbous flank, and Judas Harrow jumped out of it. "Holy one!" he yelled, breaking into a run.

  "Jude!" Red gathered enough strength to grin at him. "You got us a new ship!"

  "A gift from Major Ketta," he said, skating to a halt. He saw the look on her face and shook his head. "Don't ask. Oh, and I must warn you. It has a very annoying voice."

  Godolkin eyed the inelegant vessel with some disdain. "My torments continue."

  "Nice to see you again too," Harrow smiled. "Major Ketta gave me something else to pass on to you, Holy One. A parting gift."

  "It's a bomb," Red growled. "Dump it."

  Harrow put a hand to her shoulder. "Come aboard," he said softly. "I think you'll be surprised."

  EPILOGUE - FINAL ITERATION

  The Logic Gate would take a long time to die.

  It was like a star down there. Looking at it from orbit, Red could see it still spitting fire at the forest, or sending another vast chunk of stone into the air. Most of the Grand Keep had ended up burying itself in the jungles of Ashkelon, although some took longer than others to arrive. Maybe, Red thought, their journeys had been as strange as hers.

  As soon as that notion came to mind, she pushed it away. Her trip through the Gate wasn't something she wanted to think about now, or indeed ever again.

  There couldn't be many others who had come through it alive that day. Maybe a ship or two got free before the hangar was crushed, but no one left in the Keep could have survived. The Gothking had finally gained the peace he craved, ending his millennium of loneliness and despair, but he had taken many thousands of his progeny with him. An entire race had almost died.

  But some had got away. Even through her haze of exhaustion, hunger and pain, Red could take a little satisfaction from that. If there was one memory of this adventure she would have liked to keep in her head, it was the sight of hundreds of airboats howling away from the citadels, carrying off those Magadani brave enough to venture out into the world before the roof caved in.

  There would be a lot of changes on Magadan in the coming years. Wigs and face-powder would go out of fashion very quickly indeed.

  She stayed on the Omega ship's bridge for a time, watching the Logic Gate flare and spark below her while Godolkin tried to get used to the controls. The ship was essentially an Iconoclast design, so it wouldn't be difficult for him to master. But Harrow had been right about its voice. Its alert system wasn't based around the usual cacophony of chimes and gongs, but on a nasal, whining word-system that achieved results simply because no one could bear to listen to it for long. Godolkin contended this was the reason the Omegas abandoned the vessel after it crashed. They simply couldn't stand to hear it talking any more.

  Harrow said nothing; he smiled and kept his own council. Red, who had seen the corrosive bloodstains around the airlock and on the ceiling of the vessel's bridge, knew better.

  After a time, Red grew tired of listening to Godolkin argue with the ship, and went to find herself a cabin. There was no more reason to stay on the bridge anyway. The Logic Gate was still blazing, the seismic destruction of Ashkelon quieting now that the decryption was over. Red had never been more exhausted in her life. She left the bridge to Godolkin and Harrow, exiting with dire warnings about what would happen should either of the two men be foolish enough to disturb her for the next week or so.

  Sleep, however, wasn't the first thing on her mind.

  Red chose a cabin, one of five in the pressure cylinder, and moved in. It was very small, like all the cabins on the ship, and moving in didn't take long. Everything she had owned in this universe was gone. Clothes; weapons; perfumes, soaps and souvenirs - all
were still aboard Crimson Hunter, buried in the depths of the forest. With all the attention Ashkelon would be attracting soon, it would never be safe enough to go back and retrieve them.

  All she had left now was her soiled costume from the Masque, the dismantled auto-chetter, which Harrow had been carrying in his backpack for the past two weeks, and the case of data crystals that Ketta had left for her.

  She sat on a hard, narrow pallet and picked the case up, turning it over in her hands. It was a small thing to have cost so much, to have taken her so far. She wondered if its contents could ever be worth the price.

  Her fingers sought the locks, not through impatience, but in the hope that the case might occupy her mind for a while, maybe even make her memories of the Logic Gate go away.

  Later, she lay back in the dark, listening to the throb of the light-drive as the Omega ship powered away from Ashkelon. Red had made Godolkin stay there longer than he needed to, but finally the ship's nasal voice announced the arrival of dreadnought-sized warp-echoes, and the Iconcolast had opened the main engines up to full thrust and headed away.

  The data crystals, and their translated contents, lay strewn on the pallet around her. The case hadn't been locked, and its contents were unencrypted. It was startlingly easy to read the data she had crossed half a universe to find.

  Opened and unfolded, the case had configured itself as a compact library unit, the lid housing a holoscreen and controls while the base held the crystals, set into polyfoam inserts by clever Aranite hands. Alongside the crystals themselves was a series of crypt-discs, brimming with whatever scraps of information the Aranites had rescued from the ancient matrices. All Red had needed to do was to choose a disc and slot it into the lid, for the secrets of the translation drive project to open themselves up to her.

  In one way there had been a very great deal of information, terabytes of facts, figures and diagrams. In real terms, however, there was so little useful data on the discs that she came close to throwing them out of the nearest airlock in frustration.

  Nearly every byte that the Aranites had recovered was test data of the most esoteric kind. Red found herself poring over volumes of temperature comparisons, endless lists of seismic readings in exacting detail, page upon page detailing power fluctuations totalling hundredths of a volt. It was stultifying, mindless stuff, fit only for transfer from machine to machine, never intended to be read by living eyes.

  Disc after disc gave her more of the same, until her retinas felt burned through by tracks of glowing figures. Only when she reached the summary pages, on one of the last remaining discs, did she find what she was looking for.

  There was a proposed parts manifest which listed, in the most general terms, the kind of systems required to build a network of orbital translation drives, just in case something eighty times the mass of Earth's moon ever needed to be moved. A series of authorisation requests hinted at a timescale of four years for the end of testing, while reports of a memo from some unnamed yet powerful official body spoke of the need to cut that timescale by half. Lastly, there was a communiqué from an observatory in Mars' orbit, summarising a matrix of jumpspace triangulation tests, along with a list of recommended target points.

  Rumours and whispers, proposals and recommendations. Red should have expected nothing more, given that the Lavannos incident had taken these crystals on their fateful journey while the translation drive was still being tested. But the target points were impossible to dismiss - although there were a fair number of them, they clustered around one area of space.

  And Red knew where it was. If the data was correct, Earth lay somewhere in the Vermin Stars.

  One day she would study the data again, hunting for more nuggets of hard information. And then she would begin to trace her homeworld. But for the moment, with her head throbbing, her ribs aching and her stomach empty, she'd had all the revelations she could take.

  She still couldn't close her eyes without reliving what she had seen in the Logic Gate.

  Godolkin said he had witnessed a similar phenomenon on that awful trip, but dismissed it as nothing more than an intriguing illusion. Red sometimes wished she shared the Iconoclast's lack of imagination. Maybe then she would be able to ignore the infinity of Reds that had stared back at her from that sea of realities, each one different and each one the same. Not illusions, not optical or psychological tricks, but flesh-and-blood versions of herself with as much life and as much of a past as she. Some bizarre side effect of the encoding process had given her a window looking into uncountable alternative universes, but, in the same instant, the Reds in those other universes had been given a similar view of her own.

  How many other versions of her were out there right now, thinking those same thoughts? How many had perished on Magadan, or never made it out of the Gate? They might have been leaving Ashkelon in every direction; some heading into certain death, others into glory. Some living; some dying; some crying in pain; some shouting with pleasure. An infinity of Durham Reds.

  All those histories, all those futures. Hers only one among billions.

  It was too much. She had already been folded up into a data packet, and spent days as no more than threads of data slipping around a buried block of active silicon. Even if she could believe that she had been reconstructed exactly as she had been before the encoding, the presence of an infinite number of variations upon herself, each now aware of her existence, made her grip on reality even more fragile.

  Was she the real Durham Red? Was there even a real one?

  It was too much, too mind-blowing. Suddenly the cabin offered her no solace. Often, after her adventures had come to a close, Red would seek out a place of solitude, somewhere to sit and mull things over without any distractions. Right now, she could think of nothing worse. She went for the door, stepped back into the corridor, and headed back to the bridge.

  She would sleep later, when it didn't remind her so much of death.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Peter J Evans has over four hundred pieces of published work to his name, ranging from the back covers of videos to big articles about Serious Stuff. He has produced regular columns for gaming magazines, short fiction, long fiction, reviews, interviews and a sticker book. His first novel, Mnemosyne's Kiss, was published in 1999 by Virgin Publishing, under their worryingly short-lived Virgin Worlds imprint. Evans previously contributed towards Black Flame with Judge Dredd: Black Atlantic (co-written with Simon Jowett), Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave and Durham Red: The Omega Solution.