Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  "Of what?" Lydexia had heard nothing.

  Dema glanced briefly at her fellows and leaned closer. "Some of the helots have been heard talking. They say that the artefact has something to do with Durham Red!"

  A blunt fist of panic appeared momentarily under Lydexia's ribs, squeezing her gut. She forced it away. "Dema, you must know that's folly. If High Command thought there was even a chance the Blasphemy had been here, we would never have been granted a protection edict."

  "But what if High Command doesn't know?"

  "Are you saying our helot-workers know more about the Blasphemy's whereabouts than High Command?"

  Dema dipped her head. "Of course not. Forgive me, doctor-captain."

  "Don't fret, Dema. This isn't the Inquisition - no one's going to indict you for heresy. Besides, we all know full well that the average helot worker has more sense than the whole of High Command combined." She put her hand on the researcher's shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze. "I need you focused on the task at hand, not so frightened by rumours of the bitch saint that you can't do your job, yes?"

  Dema just nodded. Lydexia gave her shoulder a light slap and stepped away to address them all. "The clock is ticking, Archaeotechs. If any of you have heard this rumour, or any like it, put it from your mind. Say extra prayers if you have to, but say them from your landers on the way down."

  With that, and a few extra words of encouragement and respect, she finally got them out of the chapel. It was only when she was alone that she could turn back to the locker, grip its sides hard and let out a long, shuddering breath.

  This task would be hard enough without thoughts of Durham Red.

  Even the Scarlet Saint's name sent a crawling itch down her spine. The vampire was a nightmare Lydexia had grown up fearing from earliest childhood, the ultimate enemy of humankind, the hidden darkness at the heart of every mutant.

  But Durham Red was no longer just a story. She was a very real force, potent and terrifying, roaming the galaxy in search of blood and victims. Tales of her murderous exploits were already becoming legend, despite High Command's best attempts to suppress them.

  In the year and a half since the fall of Wodan, Durham Red had caused untold woe to humanity across the Accord. She had unleashed some kind of demon in the Lavannos system, something so terrible that the starship crews charged with scouring the system refused to even speak of it. She had been linked with the razing of Pyre, the attack on the Irutrean Conclave. And, in an indignity that Lydexia felt all too personally, she had boarded and robbed an Archaeotech clipper in mid-flight.

  If that wasn't enough, it seemed she could bend even the strongest Iconoclast to her will. Her power over the unfortunate heretic Matteus Godolkin was well known, but more recently the once respected Admiral Huldah Antonia had become the vampire's slave. Even a special agent, Major Nira Ketta, had gone renegade under her awful influence.

  It was horrifying, unthinkable, but impossible to deny. Ketta was a rogue now, pursuing some unspeakable business in the Balrog Cusp. Huldah Antonia had died along with her treacherous fleet in the Broteus system, unless one believed the persistent rumours of her survival. And the Scarlet Saint flew free among the stars, hunting for more Iconoclast blood to slake her sickening thirst.

  Could she have something to do with the artefact?

  Lydexia took several deep breaths, forcing her heartbeat to slow, her lungs to take in less air. She called forth the seventh cognitive catechism, letting it fill her mind for a few seconds, letting it calm her as it always did: Beati expiscari, quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt...

  Once her heartbeat had slowed to a normal level, Lydexia opened her eyes and calmly began taking her detection gear from its layers of protective foam. There was something on this artefact that was more important than fear, something that had called her across four hundred billion kilometres. She alone on this mission had the means to locate it, and she would do so if she had to rip the object open with her bare hands.

  Within half an hour the landers were down and the artefact was swarming with Archaeotechs.

  Lydexia could see dozens of them from her target point on the lower dome. Her team was spreading out across the artefact's rust brown surfaces, black-clad technicians scanning and recording data, directing helot workers to the most likely pieces of hardware. Students, with their slate grey hoods and masks, watched from the sidelines, and the hulking, brooding forms of the Custodes Arcanum, the Archaeotech division's trained warriors were everywhere.

  The artefact was seething with activity. Light drills and power cutters sparked and flared everywhere that Lydexia looked, as the helots sliced their way through its armour and into the systems beneath. It was a brutal process, violent and destructive, more like the work of rampaging barbarians than that of scientists and seekers of knowledge. The plain fact of the matter was that there simply wasn't time to study the artefact as a whole. As much data as possible had to be gathered before the cutting began, of course, simply to provide more clues about how the various pieces of hardware worked in concert. The real work was done, by necessity, back at the Archaeotech labs. Once in the safety of their temple-factories, the division could study their newfound treasures at length, poring over each fragment, picking each system apart bolt by bolt, scanning and recording until every secret was revealed. A few hours butchery here could provide the division with years of research, and the Accord with untold technological riches.

  Per cognitio, ad salus, Lydexia reminded herself. Through knowledge, to salvation. It was the principle every Archaeotech lived by, their motto and their most fervent belief. It had only been through projects like this that humanity had regained the stars, after centuries of war had reduced them to little more than savages.

  Still, she thought ruefully, it would have been nice to spend a few weeks teasing secrets out of the artefact, rather than ripping them free in a matter of hours.

  Her lander, and that containing her Custodes squad, had set down on one of three petal shaped platforms inside the upturned lower dome. Like most of the artefact's gross structure, the three petals were identical. Or rather, they should have been. The pilot had spotted anomalies on one of the platforms, which had made Lydexia's decision about which one to land on very easy indeed.

  As soon as she left the lander, she could see what the anomalies were. This platform had suffered catastrophic damage.

  Lydexia strode between hills of buckled plating, a small forest of broken and ruptured pipe work. Hirundo, the Custodes commander, kept close by, his bolter held at high port. "Take care, doctor-captain. This area could be unstable."

  "If it starts to give way, you'll just have to grab me." She turned and gave him a grin. Hirundo's expression was unreadable, his dark eyes narrow above his breathe-mask, but she wouldn't be surprised if he was smiling too. Although Scholars and Custodes rarely mixed in normal circumstances, she and Hirundo had become something close to friends over her years in the division.

  "I'll do my best," he replied. His hair, swept back in a long tail, whipped in the freezing wind. "All joking aside, my lady, I'm certain that this damage was caused by a crash. Something landed here, and did it badly."

  Lydexia had to agree. She had found several long streaks of pigmentation among the plating, colours that had no place amidst the artefact's almost uniform rust brown. Her chemical tests had dated them as only a few days old. "Someone beat us here, then."

  "They would have had time. The chronoplast wave was detected fifteen light-days away."

  This meant that the artefact had appeared around Salecah fifteen days before that. Chronoplasts travelled at light speed once they were released - Lydexia herself had proved that in a series of experiments five years earlier. According to an Iconoclast survey vessel that had passed through the system a month ago, there had been nothing previously in orbit around Salecah. It was safe to assume that the artefact had simply appeared above the gas giant, springing into existence in a burst of chronoplasts.

  How, L
ydexia could only guess. But chronoplasts were a very rare kind of particle, generated only by objects travelling through time. That fact alone made solving the Salecah object's mysteries a maximum priority.

  "It couldn't have been Harvesters," she muttered, her words emerging as steaming clouds in the frozen air. "There'd be nothing left if those scum had been here."

  She looked upward. Her sky was a great curve of red brown metal, the base of the punchbowl. She could see detail above it through the myriad gaps in the plating. Whoever or whatever had built the artefact seemed to have done so out of random scraps of ferrous metal, and every section of it was half-finished, filigreed by missing segments. Even the landing platforms beneath Lydexia's feet showed the blue haze of Salecah in a hundred patches.

  There was no beauty to this machine, she decided, despite its song. It was an industrial thing, and purely functional. Although what that function might have been, she couldn't begin to guess.

  Flocks of flying creatures swooped and dived around the punchbowl, startled by the activity. Alexus had identified them as filter feeders - pale, birdlike things native to the gas giant's upper layers. They never rested, Lydexia saw, never set down on the structure or stopped moving. Which made sense, of course - where would they ever have rested before the artefact's arrival?

  There was a chime from her belt. Lydexia tore her attention away from the fliers' hypnotic wheeling; her chronoplast wave detector was sounding an alert.

  She unclipped the device and checked its gauges. The detector was an unlovely thing, hand-built by Lydexia herself, little more than a flat box set onto a pistol grip, with a narrow funnel at one end. Lydexia aimed the funnel downwards and saw the signal decrease. An upward tilt had it at full strength again.

  A second later, the chiming stopped. The waves of chronoplasts, pitifully small compared to the burst which signalled the artefact's arrival, were growing steadily weaker and less frequent. Any one of those she had picked up might be the last, and each gave her only the haziest indication of where they were coming from.

  That had been from Vigilant, however. This signal, taken from the artefact itself, was far more precise. "I have you," she whispered. "By God, I have you..."

  "My lady?" Hirundo was looking at her quizzically, his forehead creased.

  In explanation, she lifted the wave detector. "A time machine," she said simply. "And it's close."

  Given the range and strength of the wave signal, there was only one feasible location for the chronoplast source. The device sending out pulses of time bending particles had to be in the short, thick stem that joined the lower dome to the punchbowl.

  Lydexia had known that the source was somewhere in the lower part of the artefact, but couldn't be any more certain than that. Luckily, a pulse had occurred while she was standing practically on top of the thing. For all her dozens of technicians and hundreds of helots, she might still never have found it otherwise, not in time.

  Getting into the stem wasn't easy. There were hatches, but they were locked with some kind of crypt-pattern that defeated her best data-picks. Eventually Hirundo had opened one with a shaped demolition charge, and even that only cracked a locking panel, enabling him to force the hatch aside. This part of the artefact was massively strong.

  The interior of the artefact was even stranger, if that was possible, than the outside. It was a bizarre mix of narrow, cramped chambers and cavernous vaults, connected by a maze of tunnels. Stairs and ramps seemed to lead off into empty space, while access ducts narrowed after every turn, until not even her smallest helot could squeeze through. Some of the rooms were booby-trapped, too. Lydexia lost a helot worker to a monofilament web that diced him where he stood, another to a pair of iron rams that pistoned from the walls of a corridor at head height, leaving the unfortunate worker dangling with her skull pulped between them.

  Things progressed more slowly after that, but the stem was a finite size. It was only a matter of time until the most sensitive of Lydexia's chrono-locators sounded its reedy chimes, telling her that she had found what she had crossed half a sector for.

  "So this," she breathed, "is what a time machine looks like."

  Hirundo was still with her. He'd not left her side during the hazardous trip into the stem's heart. "Are you sure, my lady?"

  "Sure?" She didn't look at him. She couldn't take her eyes off the machine. "No, I'm not sure. I won't be sure until I've taken it back to Chorazin and made it work, and maybe not even then. But this is the closest I've ever been, Hirundo. The closest anyone's been."

  The Custodes drew closer to her. "In which case, my lady, I'd advise it be stripped out of this place now, and taken aboard the Vigilant. Anything else on the artefact is secondary to this find."

  He was right, of course. Lydexia allowed herself a few more seconds to watch the machine move, before calling over her technicians and attendant helots. Getting the device off its column would be difficult enough, and as for removing it from the stem... Lydexia started seriously considering whether one of Lamarion's fusion lances would be enough to cut a hole in the artefact's shell.

  The machine itself wasn't overly big, perhaps the size of a small groundcar. The chamber it occupied must have taken up an entire level of the stem: it was a broad, flat cylinder, the circular floor a great spread of pipes and ducts that fed in through the walls to meet at the chamber's centre. Where the ducts met they rose up, tangling into a tall column of interwoven pipe work and cables, higher than a lander's dorsal fin. The machine, the core of the artefact, was perched on the top of that column.

  It was moving. Parts of it rotated, while others eased back and forth like pistons. Some of the pistons moved through the turning sections, a complex interplay of wheel and peg, shaft and socket. Every section of the device seemed to be shifting into and through every other piece in a dance that made Lydexia's eyes hurt and her mind spin. It was fascinating.

  When the helots began burning their way through the column, she had to turn away. She couldn't bear to see that dance fail. "Hirundo? Can you oversee this butchery for me? I need to report back to Vigilant, to make sure there is a suitable hold ready..."

  She trailed off. Hirundo had one hand to his ear, the other held up for silence. He was receiving a transmission through a secure channel.

  Lydexia drew close. He was murmuring into his breathe-mask, using the short-range pickup there instead of a separate comm-linker. "Confirm," he was saying. "No, confirm. Stop babbling, for God's sake!"

  She made a questioning face, but he simply raised his hand again. "Very well," he muttered. "Seal the area. No, completely. No one but myself and doctor-captain Lydexia are to know of this."

  A second later he straightened up. The call seemed to have ended. "My apologies, doctor-captain. Some of the helots working in the dome below us have discovered something. I believe you should see it."

  Lydexia spread her hands. "Can't it wait? Surely this-"

  "Now, my lady!" His expression gave her no chance to argue.

  The fist of panic returned, hard in her gut. "What is it? What have they found?"

  "A body."

  The corpse lay at the very base of the artefact, in the lower dome. The floor there was almost flat, and carved into a series of concentric channels. Blood, litres of it, had frozen into the channels, gluing the carcass to the rusted metal.

  "The throat's been torn out," said Hirundo, kneeling. "And there are scratches. Broken fingernails... Whoever did this bested her in combat, and then ripped her open."

  Lydexia felt numb. "Can it be? After all this time, is this how it ends?"

  "There are no bio-signs, my lady. Frozen or not, this is a corpse." He stood up. "Fitting, wouldn't you say?"

  "I don't understand..." Lydexia took a step back, away from the blood and the slack, open-mouthed face of the carcass. The one undamaged eye had frozen open, frosted and milky. "Who could have done this?" She turned away, back to Hirundo. "We can't tell anyone about this, not yet."

 
"My lady? Shouldn't the holy Patriarch be informed?"

  "No." She shook her head. Gradually, shock was giving way to determination. "We seal this, take the body and the time-core back to Chorazin for testing. When we are sure, then we'll tell High Command."

  "And the galaxy will rejoice," breathed Hirundo.

  "I'm not sure about the mutants," Lydexia replied softly, "but if this is true, then yes. Humanity will mark this day forever."

  She would run the tests herself, she vowed, from start to finish. For her own peace of mind, and to still the leaping of her heart, she would be the one to make sure. If it was true, if the icy corpse lying at her feet was who she thought it was, then the nightmare would finally be over.

  Humanity's greatest enemy had fallen. Durham Red, the Scarlet Saint, was dead.

  2. BETTER DEAD THEN RED

  The rumours of Durham Red's death took six weeks to reach Dedanas. In the passenger tender al-Qirmiza, shuttling its occupants and their luggage down through the ocean world's soupy atmosphere, it was the only topic of conversation.

  "A damned disaster," snapped Marentus Brae, flinging up his hands in disgust. The gesture made the multiple rings on his fat fingers clatter against one another and his chins wobble alarmingly. "If the bitch saint is dead, it can only mean trouble, and trouble on a sector-wide scale. I could be ruined."

  The tender was spherical, a globe of brassy metal thirty metres across, and its passengers sat around the inner wall of a circular upper deck. They faced each other from the soft confines of a continuous leather couch.

  A pair of mutants sitting across from Brae tilted their heads in unison. "Surely not, honoured Het," they began, speaking as one. They were identical, small and slim under their dark robes, with a fat tube of pulsing, knotted flesh joining their skulls, left temple to right. "If Saint Scarlet is truly dead, won't the Tenebrae rise in anger?"