Which didn't make it any easier seeing them nailed up in rows.
Red felt her face twisting into a snarl. Her main objective here was the Shantima haul, but if there was room for a little payback on the way then all the better.
She set off, her blade ready.
She decided to skirt around, to get into the landing-craft from the other side, along the towering wall of rock Harrow had called the Shear.
She headed out, half a curving kilometre across the dunes, before turning back and making her way towards the cutter. It was a big vessel, massively armoured, as squat and menacing as a crouching tarantula. The loading ramp was open, light washing down from inside.
Red stopped and crouched behind a nearby dune. She had flown in one of these things before - to the surface of Pyre, while that world still burned - but she had forgotten just how massive the cutters were. It could hold hundreds of Tenebrae troops.
Once again, she realised just how far she'd come without any particular plan. "I really wish I didn't do that," she whispered to herself.
As if in answer, the voice of Matteus Godolkin sounded at her waist. "Blasphemy?"
Red ducked back behind the dune, bringing the comm-linker up. "This isn't the best time, Godolkin-"
"Get ready. You have company."
She was just about to ask what he meant when one of the Vampyrs blew itself to pieces.
For a second the desert lit up bright as day, turned yellow-white by the searing glare of the explosion. Red turned to see the assault craft gone, replaced by an expanding sphere of fire. Heat stung her, and she felt the hot air roil as great chunks of debris whirled past.
One of the Vampyr's wings span into the Shear, bounced back in blazing pieces.
Alert chimes began to gong inside the cutter. Red heard the hammering of armoured boots, and kept low as several dozen Tenebrae warriors came belting down the ramp, priming their weapons. In moments the whole desert was alive with sirens and voice-amplified commands and the sweeping, criss-crossing threads of a hundred laser-sights.
There was a rising scream, a wash of heat. The remaining Vampyrs were trying to get airborne, but before their landing spines could raise Red saw staccato bursts of light spit down from the sky, ripping into the two assault craft and tearing them open. One crashed back down onto the desert in flames, incinerating a troop of Tenebrae. The other managed to climb for a few seconds, its drives vomiting flame, before a volley blasted it in two. The separate parts corkscrewed back down into the dunes, sending up great fountains of fire and sand as they struck.
"This," said Durham Red, "is getting just a bit hairy..."
She jumped onto the ramp and ran up it, vaguely aware that the stealth-cape was going a bit mad trying to keep up with the rapid changes in colour and light. Perhaps that was why the three Tenebrae warriors stationed at the top of the ramp didn't start firing until she was halfway up: they must have been wondering what this bizarre, coruscating shape bearing down on them was.
If so, it was the last question they would ever ask. The closest died with Harrow's knife buried in his throat, hurled with lethal accuracy from ten metres away. With a hand thus freed, Red hauled out one of the guns she'd brought along, a particle magnum with a barrel almost as long as a rifle. She ducked the frag shells coming back down the ramp towards her, firing the first shot as she was still swinging the gun up, the second as she brought it back down.
The magnum, as its name suggested, was sickeningly powerful. The Tenebrae were literally blasted apart, torsoes detonating as the bolts of charged particles superheated their innards. Red ran past two blazing corpses to get to the top of the ramp, one with arms and legs hanging together by threads of flesh, the other consisting of nothing above the waist except flames and a blackened twist of spine.
No one else troubled her on the way to the hold. She was even able to pause in the ship's central corridor, and take a minute to raise Crimson Hunter on the comm-linker. "Godolkin? What the sneck's going on out there?"
"As we suspected, the Tenebrae destroyed an Iconoclast vessel on their way in. It appears that ship's passing did not go unremarked. Be advised that, if the Iconoclast forces follow standard tactics, the cutter will be their primary target once the ground assault is under way."
The corridor branched away. Red peered around the corner. "How long will that be?"
"Not very long."
"Figures." The entrance to the hold was just ahead of her now. She raised the magnum and trotted forwards. "Get ready to fire her up, Godolkin. We might need to bail in a hurry."
It wasn't difficult to find the Shantima debris. The Tenebrae had reserved the hold's most secure area for its storage, which meant very little when Durham Red had a powergun in her fist and an Iconoclast army at her back. The hatch-seals proved no more resilient in the face of the magnum's blasts than the Tenebrae warriors on the ramp.
Red stepped through the smouldering doorway and into a little piece of Lavannos.
Many of the objects surrounding her were still embedded in that nightmare world's unmistakable glassy stone. The stuff, Red remembered vividly, ran like water when subjected to enough heat. There must have been heat in abundance when the Iconoclasts blasted Lavannos to fragments.
They hadn't managed to destroy everything, though. Enough had survived to attract the Harvesters.
Red walked between racks of burned and broken machinery; random chunks of the frozen moon's three remaining translation drives. The Tycho unit had taken itself and a quarter of Lavannos's mass back to whatever Hades it came from, but the other three drives had survived. One of them, by the looks of things, had only received a glancing shot when the kill-fleets arrived to sterilise what remained.
Red scanned the shelves quickly, making sure nothing remained that could be useful to either the Tenebrae or the Iconoclasts. From what she could gather it seemed that only the mutant extremists were interested in saving anything of Lavannos. The Iconoclasts, possibly under the guidance of Admiral Huldah Antonia, were only interested in removing all trace of it.
Which was a sentiment Durham Red could wholeheartedly agree with. And, in fact, assist.
She reached into her cape, to the detonex charges clipped to her belt. There were three charges, which should be quite enough for a structure this size. She might even be overdoing it. But then, overdoing things was what Red did best.
She placed the charges among the Shantima debris, setting each one to remote activation, then headed for the hatchway. It was only when she was leaving that she noticed the row of canisters on a rack near the entrance.
Red paused. There was something about the canisters - six of them, each roughly the size of two fists - that was oddly familiar. She picked one up and used her thumb to wipe away some of the carbon and blobs of melted rock. There was writing there, yellow paint just showing against the black. Most of it was gone, crumbled by time and heat, but there was enough to suggest part of a word.
DAT, it looked like.
"Data?" breathed Red. "Data storage?"
The canisters couldn't still hold any useful information, could they?
She should leave these things to the flames, she knew. But then again...
There were pockets in the cape. They were just big enough to take all six canisters.
She waited until she was well away from the cutter before she triggered the detonex.
The battle between the surviving Tenebrae and their Iconoclast enemies was in full swing when she hit the button. The night was alive with flashes of plasma, the heavy chattering of frag-shells, the snarling of daggerships racing overhead. Red saw three of the brutally fast little vessels levelling off for a strafing run at the cutter, and decided to save them the bother. She raised her comm-linker and keyed the detonation code.
There was a moment, an awful half-second, when nothing happened. Then the cutter burst open along its port flank, spilling a sheet of flame into the night. An instant later the entire vessel vanished in a fireball so vast
it took dozens of foot-soldiers, and one daggership, with it.
If there had been any pieces of useful Lavannos technology in the cutter, they were useful no longer.
Red turned away from the battle and began to trot off through the dunes. Crimson Hunter had landed a couple of kilometres away from the Shear, behind a series of small hills. With its stealth-suite activated, the yacht shouldn't attract any attention. The Iconoclasts would be too busy slaughtering the Tenebrae to notice it anyway.
She was within sight of the ship when she ran into the Iconoclast patrol.
There were nine of them, in full shocktrooper armour, spread out across a low-lying dune. Red was almost on top of them before she noticed they were there. She'd been going too fast, her mind on other things, certain that all the action was going on behind her. It could have been a fatal mistake.
Luckily for her, the shocktroopers were all facing in the wrong direction.
That wasn't a situation that could last, though. Where Tenebrae warriors relied on brute strength and relentless viciousness to see them through, the Iconoclast soldiers were modified for the task. Their senses, in particular, were massively augmented. Some of the troopers were already sniffing the air.
Looks like my deodorant isn't making it anymore, Red thought. Oh well.
She straightened up, unsealing the cape. As it fell from her shoulders she called out to the troopers, "Hi guys! Looking for me?"
The troopers whirled, bringing their holy weapons to bear, activating their mighty silver blades.
Red gave them a toothy grin.
"Okay," she purred. "Which one of you bitches wants to dance?"
3. NOAMON
"Honoured comrades," smiled Lord Tactician Saulus. "Observe the Blasphemy."
He touched a control, and the Chapel of Enlightenment darkened. The far wall, beyond Saulus and his pulpit, grew a slab of greyish light. The slab expanded until it was all that Huldah Antonia could see.
There was a desert in it.
Her perception twisted. One moment she was looking at the surface of the slab, seeing planes of light and shadow forming within it, and in the next her vision dropped forward through the holofield.
Antonia blinked. Her eyes always seemed to behave the same way with flat-field holograms, but she had never enjoyed the sensation. She shifted uncomfortably in her pew, hoping that no one would pick up on the gesture.
Fat chance. She was sitting in a darkened hall, surrounded by two hundred other Iconoclast commanders, and she was still being watched. She could feel it.
It was a feeling she had become rather familiar with.
It was night in the desert. Antonia could see dunes rising away into the gloom. In the distance reared some vast wall of rock, stretching clear across the holofield. Double moonlight filtered hazily through thin, grubby-looking clouds, and there were strange coils and wisps hanging dead in the air. Saulus had the playback frozen, she realised, while he set up the rest of his little show.
"Gadara," he said quietly. "An uncolonised world on the fringes of Accord territory. Mostly lifeless. Nothing of interest there at all." He tapped at another control, bringing a series of panels into being along the slab's upper edge. "Apart from an active cell of Tenebrae, of course."
"We know this," an admiral near the front muttered. There was a general grumble of agreement.
"Hmm," Salus said, the noise was a habit of his. "Merely setting the scene, Hets. I've activated biometric readouts for the troopers involved. Don't pay too much attention to them now, but feel free to review them later. They could provide insight."
Antonia glanced up. Nine panels had appeared, each bearing the name of an Iconoclast shocktrooper, along with gauges for heart-rate, blood-pressure, armour integrity. Frozen, for now, like the desert.
A robed man sitting near the pulpit raised a hand. "The rank-badges," he said, gesturing at the panels. "Are they accurate?"
At the sound of his voice, Antonia shrank a little in her seat. Dear God, she thought, they've dragged Trophimus into this farce as well? Things were worse than she'd feared.
Saulus had dipped his head towards Trophimus. "They are, fleet admiral. There is not one man in that squad below the rank of sergeant."
There was a collective gasp, a ripple of disbelief, but Saulus had touched a final control. The holographic view spun.
The holo-pickup must have been attached to the armour of one of the shocktroopers, and that man had been turning when the playback had been frozen. Antonia saw the desert whirl, the wisps abruptly in roiling motion. Fires had been burning in the dunes that night.
Figures moved past her view, more shocktroopers, holy weapons raised. They were all wheeling around in response to something behind them.
Durham Red.
The view settled, with the Blasphemy dead-centre. She stood nonchalantly on the sand, shrugging her way out of some kind of robe to reveal leather and lace beneath. As the garment hit the ground behind her, she smiled.
Fangs glittered brightly in the moonlight. "Okay. Which one of you bitches wants to dance?"
The slab seemed to explode.
Every trooper had opened fire at the same moment, five with staking pins, the rest with jets of cleansing fire. Ammo-feed counters on the readout panels began to drop, heart-rates to climb.
The Blasphemy had leapt five metres into the air.
The view spun to follow her. She came down next to one of the troopers, hit him backhanded across the side of the head with a sound like gunfire. As the man's body spun away, Antonia saw one of the readouts go suddenly dark.
Durham Red had moved again, stunningly fast. A surge of fire aimed at her caught another trooper instead, turning the man into an inferno. The readout panel went wild, then dark; in the slab a column of greasy flame took two steps and collapsed.
The view shifted again. It was jolting, jerking as the man carrying the pickup ran across the sand, firing as he went. The noise of staking pins blasting into the darkness was deafening.
There was the sound of more blows, more screams. A man staggered past with half his head gone, another dropped to kneel motionless with his own silver blade buried hilt-deep in the top of his skull. The readouts were going dark faster than Antonia could track.
Within seconds, only one man remained. The view turned away from the carnage, began to jolt off through the dunes. "He's running," breathed Antonia.
A man next to her nodded. "Wouldn't you?"
The view spun crazily to a halt, tipped over. Something blurred past it: the Blasphemy's face, mouth gaping, fangs bright.
Blood exploded over the pickup. The holofield turned crimson.
And froze.
"Twenty-eight seconds, give or take," said Saulus, taking his hand from the playback controls.
Antonia swallowed. She had seen men die before, but this display had made her feel oddly queasy. Perhaps it had been the biometric icons. Seeing those heartbeats fluttering out, brainwaves fracturing to stillness, as the troopers in the holo screamed and died... There was something sickeningly intimate about it.
By the murmurs echoing around the Chapel of Enlightenment, she was not the only Iconoclast there to find the footage disturbing.
She looked up at Saulus. The man had stepped back, away from the controls. His eyes were fixed on the slab. There were dim blue lumes in the pulpit, and in their light his high forehead shone with sweat.
How much had he been enjoying this?
After a few seconds Saulus turned, raised his hands for silence. "Comrades! Please, I understand your feelings. No one could watch such a thing and remain unmoved-"
"Unmoved?" A woman in the front pew - a land-forces brigadier, Antonia realised - was on her feet. "Lord tactician, we are appalled. How dare you soil this temple-station with such foul imagery."
There were others getting up too, angry shouts from every quarter. Antonia followed suit. "And since when," she called out, "has it been normal procedure to fit holo-pickups to the armour of Icono
clast shocktroopers? Or is voyeurism no longer considered a perversion among the ranks?"
There were a few cries of agreement, swiftly muted when people realised it was she who had spoken. Antonia couldn't help smiling. Her eye caught that of Trophimus, as he shot her a warning glance: Careful, daughter.
Antonia moved her right hand slightly, made the battlesign-gesture for calm, for knowledge. I know what I'm doing, her fingers told him. "And perhaps," she continued, "the lord tactician would also like to explain the wisdom of a shocktrooper squad consisting entirely of officers?"
Her outburst had achieved its aim - few in the room wanted to be seen on her side, so they were shutting up in waves. Antonia sat back down, grimly satisfied as the Chapel of Enlightenment grew silent. Being a pariah had certain uses.
Saulus gave her a slight bow, little more than a tilt of the head. "Simply to prove a point, Het Admiral."
"A point worth the lives of nine men?"
"Precisely." He stabbed a finger up at the slab. "Nine experienced shocktroopers, none ranked below sergeant. The best men with the best training and equipment the Accord can provide. The best, Hets. All now having their intact organs reclaimed for field-transplant."
He worked the controls for a moment. The slab flickered, and the Blasphemy appeared there again, the footage jumping back to the first sight they'd had of her. Tall and slender, face pale in the night, shrugging out of the desert-cloak. Smiling.
The view froze, and dark shapes at the monster's hips turned suddenly to brilliant green silhouette. "You see? She was wearing sidearms. And she didn't even bother to draw them." He turned away from the slab.
"Partway through the assault, a report came in that the Blasphemy was on Gadara. One always does, but this time it turned out to be true, as you have seen. Nine shocktroopers were despatched to investigate. They met the monster, and they died."
"Why only nine?" That was the brigadier again. "There was an army on Gadara."
"Most were otherwise occupied. But the result would have been the same. If we had sent ninety, then ninety would have died."
The Omega Solution Page 3
