She wasn't having much success with the last part.
Before long the lumes would come back up in the hall, and the Umbrae Nova would file back in. Red didn't know how much time she had before the next operation - Dathan was still being secretive about such things - but it wouldn't be long. The Iconoclast civil war couldn't sustain itself for many more days. Once peace broke out, the Umbrae Nova would have missed their chance.
In hours at most, more ships would leave the protection of the pulsar, and the killing would begin again.
Light spilled abruptly into the hall. Red saw it cross the floor and looked up, saw that the door had swung open. A familiar silhouette stood outlined in the glare. She smiled. "Hey."
"I was told you were here, Blasphemy." Matteus Godolkin stepped through the doorway, his massive old combat boots perfectly silent on the dark floor. "However, I did not expect to find you engaged in mediation. Should I come back later?"
"No." She beckoned. "No, come on in. I was going to give you a call anyway."
He stalked across the rostrum to join her. "Why? Have you run out of people to bleed?"
"Don't be like that." She straightened her back, stretched her arms up to get the kinks out of her shoulders. "Anyway, they've been pretty generous around here. Lining up to be bitten by the almighty Saint Scarlet... I don't think any of them realise just how much it snecking hurts until I do it, though."
"I could have told them. I remember."
"Yeah, but I wasn't being gentle with you." She sighed. "Whatever. I need your advice."
His eyebrows went up, just a fraction. "In what regard?"
"You've heard about the next op, right?"
"The shipyard assault." He nodded. "Harrow gave me the basic outline."
The basic outline, Red thought sourly, was about as much as anyone had. Dathan knew that there were three, maybe four places a massed fleet of Iconoclast reinforcements could launch from, depending on the location of the Conclave. Once the tech teams had identified where the summit was to be held, he'd send a fast attack fleet to the appropriate shipyard.
Vessels stationed in shipyards would be powered down, unprotected. Even the ones not under repair wouldn't be able to get their forcewalls up in time, and the shipyard's defences would be light. The attacking fleet would tear them apart.
"Yeah, well. I'm commanding the lead ship, doing my mutant messiah bit again." She leaned back and put her bare feet up on the rostrum. She'd left her boots in the bedchamber, preferring to feel the deck under her toes for a while. "Jubal's got some fast gunships rigged to carry nuclear torpedoes."
"Jubal is a capable fleet captain. For a mutant."
"Um. Thing is, Godolkin, I'm wracking my brains here, trying to come up with a way to stop this turning into another killing zone. I don't want it to be like Hermes Alpha."
"The Hermes Alpha operation was successful, Blasphemy. We achieved all our objectives with minimal losses - which part of that troubles you?"
"The part where we slaughter thousands in the name of peace, dipstick. That part." She made a disgusted face. "Christ, half of them weren't even soldiers. Those workers, what do they call them?"
"Helots."
"That's it. Poor sneckers. I mean, they put up one hell of a fight, but what for? All we needed to do was blow the generators - they could have fixed them in a few weeks."
"They could if any had survived."
"Godolkin? Those were your people." She saw his mouth open, and cut him off. "Yeah, okay, before they declared you a heretic and put a price on your head almost as big as mine. But you know them. If I'd given them a chance to back off, let us frag the machines and leave, would they have taken it?"
"Never in a million years."
"Didn't think so." She closed her eyes. "I'm screwed."
There was silence for a time. She knew he was watching her. Then she heard him get up and cross the rostrum. When she looked up she saw that he was working Jubal's holo controls.
Light sprang up in the centre of the hall, squeezed itself down into a horribly familiar shape, a spindly fusion of axe-blade and angel fish.
"The Iconoclast killship-class dreadnought," said Godolkin. "It carries a crew of four thousand, a complement of two hundred daggership interceptors. It is armed with antimat cannon, heavy and light fusion lances, multiple hunger-gun emplacements. It also," he said carefully, tapping at the controls, "has three fundamental weak spots."
Red sat up. Bright circles had appeared on the killship.
"The first are the damper decks - if these sustain damage, cascade failures of the damper arrays are likely, leaving the vessel dangerously exposed to further damage. Second are the fusion cores. Due to the killship's configuration, these can taken out by broadside attacks. Any core that goes nova will destroy the vessel utterly."
"Those are just quick ways of blowing the thing up, Godolkin. What else have you got?"
He pointed. "The last is the linkage between the main hull and the primary drive assembly. A concentration of damage in this location would sever the control connections to the drives. In battle this is considered irrelevant, since it leaves the weapons and systems usable. No enemy would waste firepower on a disabling wound when an eviscerating one is available. But for your purposes, that might be the most effective target. Casualties would be light, and the vessels would be unable to leave the shipyard until repaired."
"So we could just knock their wheels off..." Red thought hard. What had Jubal told her? "The torpedoes have got a half-megatonne yield. Is that going to be enough?"
"Adequate."
Red jumped up. "That's more like it! Fifty ships, two torps per ship, that's anything up to a hundred killships out of play!"
"An optimistic estimate."
"I'll just tell them they'd better not miss, or I won't bite them anymore."
Godolkin accompanied her to Emissary's flight deck. Ten of Jubal's gunships - Banshees, he'd called them - were stationed there, being fitted with the massive gravity-imbalance torpedoes. The plan was to launch the Banshees while still around the pulsar, and to have them jump in with a squadron of frigates for support.
Red could tell Godolkin had something on his mind. She waited until they were alone, in one of the inter-deck elevators, before she asked him about it. "Cred for your thoughts?"
"Which means what, exactly?"
"It means, 'what are you thinking about so hard, that you're walking around with a face like a smacked arse?'"
"Ah." She knew he had trouble with the way she spoke, sometimes. Most people did. "I am troubled, Blasphemy."
"By the op?"
"By Xandos Dathan."
The way she said it made Red feel suddenly defensive. "I thought you said his tactics were sound."
He folded his arms. "In the most part, they are. That is what gives me pause - it throws his errors into sharper focus."
She rolled her eyes. "Orteus, you mean."
"I re-checked the data I uploaded to the Emissary. Crimson Hunter's capabilities were clearly outlined, including the vessel's maximum and cruising speeds. For Dathan to mis-time our arrival was either an act of supreme carelessness, or deliberate malice."
"Malice? Oh come on," scoffed Red. "If he wanted you out of the way there'd be surer ways of doing it than that!"
"Are there? In other respects his intelligence has been highly accurate. Enostine is a master of spycraft. I cannot believe she did not know when the Iconoclasts would arrive. There is also the question of the Tisiphone."
The elevator had reached its floor, the doors sliding open. Red stepped out onto an observation gallery overlooking the landing deck. Umbrae Nova guards lined the walls, and ahead was a huge open space - Emissary's main launch area.
Below her, half-wreathed in smoke and fumes, crouched a Banshee. It was an unlovely thing, squat and shadow-grey, a wasp fused with a woodlouse. Red watched figures moving through the gas surrounding it; Emissary's deck-crew, preparing the gunships for the mission. Every time th
e smoke cleared for a second she could see cables and pipes strewn everywhere.
The guards were well within earshot. They had probably been ordered not to eavesdrop, but Red wasn't that trusting. She dropped her voice to a whisper. "What about it?"
"Have you any idea how many troops a ship like that could hold?"
"Twenty kilometres long, so roughly... A lot?"
"More than a lot, Blasphemy. Half a million, with ease. I have spoken to Harrow, and he cannot see a way that Dathan could have siphoned away that many sympathisers since the fall of Pyre. Even if such a number of Tenebrae were open to persuasion, their loss would be noticed. A man might ignore an insect bite, but not an arterial haemorrhage."
"Nice image." She turned away from the deck and leaned back on the rail. "You're making me thirsty."
Godolkin wasn't going to be sidetracked. "In addition, Dathan's insistence that the ship is not yet ready for combat does not ring true. If work is being done on it, where are the support vessels? Have you seen any external activity on that ship?"
Red was becoming acutely aware of all those mirrored visors pointing her way. "You know how they say there's a time and a place for everything, Godolkin...?"
"Blasphemy, heed me." He strode quickly along the gallery to join her, and lowered his voice so much that only she could have heard it. "There is more taking place here than we know. Do not let this man, or this dream of peace, blind you."
"I haven't," she hissed.
"In which case, when was the last time you considered what the Aranites might be doing with your data-cores?"
He turned and stalked away, leaving her standing there on the gallery with a fume-laden mist from the deck drifting around her bare feet, and a sudden spike of cold horror rising up in her chest.
She went back to the bedchamber. The thought of inspecting the Banshees had suddenly lost all appeal.
Above her, the ceiling bled gentle, soothing light. The silk sheets at her back were a welcome coolness. But in the space behind her eyes, Durham Red seethed.
Godolkin couldn't have been right, could he?
Amazingly, she had forgotten about the crystals. Once they had meant everything to her - they were a danger that had to be suppressed, yet a lure she couldn't resist. The knowledge they might contain could give her the location of a lost world. In the wrong hands, it could bring danger of untold proportions. Humans had used the translation drive to move the moon out of Earth's orbit, a test of a system they hoped would protect their homeworld. Instead, Luna had gone somewhere else, far outside the normal universe. Trapped in that loathsome dimension the drive-crew had been driven murderously insane, while the moon's surface melted into a glassy foam.
And when the moon returned, centuries later, it had at its heart a predatory, sentient cancer the size of a small planet, a creature whose psychic weaponry made all Dathan's firepower look like toys. What if the Aranites tried to recreate what the ancient humans had done? What if they sold the crystals to someone else, someone deranged enough to build another drive? Sneck, there were enough madmen in this galaxy.
She sat up and shook herself.
No, it couldn't be done. No one in the Accord, not even the Aranites, had the kind of technology needed to make another Lavannos happen. The Accord was full of wonders, to be sure: spaceships the size of Tisiphone, weapons that could immolate a world. But when it came to computers or automation they were back in the dark ages. The crystals could wait until Red was done with the Umbrae Nova. Once it was all over, one way or another, she'd make time for a quick jaunt back to Lyricum and collect what was hers.
But now, if truth be told, Red was starting to doubt Xandos Dathan. She rolled over, cursing Godolkin into her pillow.
The Iconoclast was right about Tisiphone, she had to admit. The more she thought about the troop-carrier, the more she worried about it. What would be the point of a ship that size? If Dathan's army was inside it, how were they going to get groundside? And surely, being inside a big, slow-moving vessel made them frighteningly vulnerable. All it would take would be one happy soul with a fusion cannon and the Conclave wouldn't have anything to worry about.
Red couldn't believe Dathan could make that big a mistake.
She got up and pulled on her boots. The Umbrae Nova leader was with the tech teams, sorting through the Hermes Alpha data, and probably would be for hours. The other commanders were occupied too - rotund, hairless Jubal making preparations for the mission, Parmenas drilling his troops, Sibbecai off somewhere scaring people. Enostine lurking like a spindly bug in a hole, seeing everything with her huge, dark eyes.
Well, there was one thing she hadn't seen. Red padded over to the wall and touched a panel there, stepping aside as a concealed drawer slid open. The room was ringed with storage spaces: cupboards and drawers and entire wardrobes, all hidden behind the smooth walls.
This drawer was full of guns, the ones she'd had Godolkin bring over from Crimson Hunter.
Red knelt down, making sure her body covered what she was doing from any vid-pickups in the ceiling. She lifted the two particle magnums out and set them aside, along with the plasma derringer and her battered old auto-chetter. That enabled her to get to the bigger guns beneath.
There were spare magazines, too. Red selected one, ran her thumbnail down a seam in its edge. The mag popped open. Inside, hidden from prying eyes, was a data pick.
She'd borrowed the pick from Judas Harrow months before. He'd bought it to break into the temple of the Osculum Cruentus, back when they'd been holding her captive. Red didn't remember that time at all - the cultists had kept her drugged beyond reason - but she knew that Harrow would never have been able to get her away without this tiny gizmo.
Basically, the data-pick did exactly what it said on the tin. Placed over any electronic lock it would hunt through trillions of code-combinations within a few seconds, tracking down the faintest quantum whispers of voltage and information, then generate tiny patterns of force to trip the catch. It was a device at the limits of Accord technology; hideously expensive, highly illegal. It had cost Harrow more in money and favours than Crimson Hunter.
She slipped it into a pocket, replaced the guns, and stood up, nudging the drawer closed with her foot.
The panelled corridor outside was devoid of guards. Red's bedchamber was in Dathan's private section of the ship, and he didn't like armoured men cluttering the place up and spoiling the decor. For an ex-Tenebrae cultist he had a surprising sense of the aesthetic.
No doubt there were cameras everywhere, but right now Red didn't care much about that. If anyone asked, she'd say she was sleepwalking.
She trotted up to the big, oak-clad hatch at the end of the corridor. There was a pad next to it where Dathan would place his palm to unlock it. Red knew better than to try that. If the lock's mechanism didn't recognise her handprint, she'd get a poisoned needle through her palm. Instead, she took out the data-pick and pressed it against the pad.
There was a soft chirrup from the pick, and the hatch slid open.
Red stepped smartly inside, letting it close behind her. Dathan's table was set much as she remembered it from her last visit, where she'd come within seconds of ripping his neck open over the consommé. There was no food laid out, though, which was a good sign. Red moved past the table, putting the data-pick away as she did so, and pushed open the door at the far end of the room.
"Bingo," she breathed. Dathan's private chamber.
His bed, she noticed, was much like hers, although the sheets he favoured were black, not crimson. There were shelves arranged around one section of the curving wall, studded with books. Real books, paper or plastic pages bound in leather. Rare things.
Red couldn't help getting closer and reading a few titles. "Liber Mutatis, The Martyrs - Terrorism in a Cultural Context, Mein Kampf, Kitab Al-Azif... Snecking hell, Dathan! No comic-books? What's wrong with you?"
She crossed the room. Dathan had a desk set opposite the bookshelves, one edge of it slightly c
urved to meet the shape of the wall. He'd been working on something there; a device of some kind lay in pieces on the worn leather desktop. Red crouched to study it, careful not to move any of the fragments.
It was about the size of the data-pick, although it flared out into a bulge at one end. The thing's casing was open, and several small blocks of material had been unseated from the wide end and laid out in a neat row. She peered at them suspiciously.
"If I didn't know better," she muttered aloud, "I'd say that was data-storage."
One of Sibbecai's parasites? She'd not seen how the tech-teams were equipped.
Maybe she'd been underestimating the Accord's tech-level after all. The parasite, or whatever it might have been, seemed more sophisticated and compact than anything she'd seen outside of the Lavannos drive-complex. It made even the data-pick seem clunky.
Red had to admit that she didn't like the look of it at all.
There was nothing else in the room that caught her eye, and certainly nothing to either confirm or allay her fears about Xandos Dathan. He had some unusual reading habits and an interest in cutting-edge data technology, but where was the harm in that? If she was honest, Red found the idea of black silk sheets more disturbing.
It had been a mistake, coming here. Time to go back to her room and plead ignorance.
She headed back through the chamber and into the dining hall, making sure the door was closed behind her, then padded silently past the long table. She felt her hip brush past the linen cloth.
Outside the door, the clicking of boot heels.
Red froze. Few people could have heard the sound through the closed hatch. Godolkin, maybe, with his augmented hearing. Red herself wouldn't have caught it if the person walking towards her had been making an effort to conceal themselves. Which meant she hadn't been caught out. Yet, anyway.
Those boots were no more than a couple of seconds away. Red couldn't make it back to Dathan's bedchamber in time, which left exactly one spot in which to hide.
The Omega Solution Page 15
