Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

  By the time Red regained her senses, the slave revolt was in full swing.

  The feedback surge had taken out everything: automated weapons, electronic tagging systems, even the magnetic locks that held the prisoners to their chains. The guards must have found themselves in absolute darkness, with no working communications, and surrounded by several thousand angry ex-slaves. They couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds.

  Red made her way in through the entry hall, staggering slightly at first, but growing steadier on her feet with every second. She passed Loman's body on the way in. It had been flung a considerable distance into the hall, actually fetching up against the doors at the far end. Red didn't bother to check for the man's vital signs; it was quite obvious he wouldn't have any. Most of the contents of his torso and skull lay in a broad trail behind him, pointing back towards the wrecked car. He was empty by the time he hit the doors.

  Inside the mine, the only light was from fires. Red could hear shouts from within, echoing around the cavernous galleries and broad tiers, cries of triumph, of rage, of fear. Old scores were being settled out there in the darkness, and not every slave in the pit would walk free from Ulai.

  Red stopped the first group that came past her, asking if they knew the man who called himself Joash. They didn't know him, but they could see by the light of their torches that Red wasn't one of the guards. She didn't tell them who she was. That would have caused more confusion than was already gripping the place, and as far as Red could see the situation was already as confused as it had any right to be. So she told them how best to escape, and that help was on the way. They might not be able to get to the Ulai fin, but with a concerted effort they could take the refinery. What they did after that was their own business.

  The next group didn't know Joash either, but the third knew that he worked down on the fourth tier. In this manner, Red gradually worked her way through the chaos and the carnage, until one of the mobs she encountered parted at her question, and Joash stepped forward.

  She could see instantly why Loman had set him to work instead of blowing his brains out onto the bare rock. He was tall and powerfully muscled, although the brutal regime had taken a toll on him. The torches illuminated a face that was all hatred and scars, and hands that clutched a guard's rifle as though it was the only thing he had ever wanted to hold.

  "I've got a message for you," she told him, "from Ascha."

  He stepped towards her, gripping the rifle hard. "Where did you hear that name?"

  "From the transmission she sent. She made it up the hoist tower, you know. All the way onto the transfer platform and into the comms bay, before she died. She sent her signal back to your fleet."

  At those words, he seemed to sag. The gun fell from his hands. "I knew she was dead," he whispered. "Moon of blood, I could feel it..."

  Red put her hand on his shoulder. "You're free because of her. You all are."

  He nodded. "What was the message?"

  "She said that there was nothing you could have done. That she loved you, and that she was proud to be your wife."

  "God," he said simply, and closed his eyes.

  Red gave his shoulder a squeeze. "Joash, I'm so sorry. I wish I could give you more time, but you know there isn't any. I've got a ship waiting to take you back. We have to go now."

  His eyes, when they opened again, glistened in the torchlight. "I can't go back. I failed him."

  "Joash, Commander Sibbecai asked me personally to come and find you." Red chuckled. "What, you think he's going to abandon his own son?"

  5. FURY

  By the time Omega Fury left the orbit of Dedanas, it was already part of an exodus. Red sat in the weapons throne and watched dozens of starships ripping their way up through the ocean world's atmosphere, desperate to escape. Yachts and luxury cutters were swooping up on their grav-lifters, accelerating past haulers and bulk transports like minnows darting past whales. Passenger clippers spiralled into the air at speeds that must have terrified those inside, and Red even saw a stream of tenders rising from the Ulai fin like brass bubbles, climbing into orbit in the vain hope that something would be there to latch onto them and carry them away to safer worlds.

  Most of the ships had come from the fin. News of the slave revolt must have spread through its communications network in minutes. Red could only imagine the panic that must have caused, but she couldn't bring herself to feel much sympathy for the Dedani. No one on that world could have remained totally ignorant of what was going on in the mines; it was too big an operation. And if there were people on the fin who didn't know exactly where their profits were coming from, it could only have been through a lifetime of very carefully looking the other way.

  Not any longer. The slaves had been culled from all races and all walks of life. Captured Iconoclast shock troopers had broken stone along with Tenebrae clerics, humans and mutants suffering side by side. If Red had been expecting that to turn them into a unified force, banding together against a common enemy, she would have been fooling herself, and she wasn't that stupid - most of the workers had turned on each other as soon as their chains came off. The mix of slaves, though, meant that as soon as the first distress calls were sent out both human and mutant ships would have been on their way to help. Dedanas wasn't technically within the Accord, existing as it did within the sprawling border area known as the Periphery, but that wouldn't stop the interested parties flying in with all guns blazing.

  High Command would want their troopers back. The Tenebrae would want to pick up agents they might have had in the mines before the humans arrived, along with any disgruntled mutants who might be turned to their cause. The sector authorities would send ships to collect unaffiliated citizens from both species, while hospital vessels, freelance chroniclers, Harvesters and even pirates would be powering in at maximum speed factor too. No wonder Fury left Dedanas space among a swarm of jump-points and drive flares.

  Red was quite relieved when Fury went to superlight. There were so many ships in the sky she was beginning to worry about colliding with something.

  When the deck had stopped shaking, Red hit the release on her control board. The throne slid backwards, out of the workstation, and then turned ninety degrees as it reached the end of its track. The safety harness unlocked automatically, but for the moment Red stayed where she was.

  "That," she said brightly, "didn't go badly at all."

  She saw Godolkin's head turn slightly towards her, although he didn't take his eyes off his screens. "Considering your recent operational record, Blasphemy, I have to agree. So far all our objectives have been met with the minimum of injury, humiliation and personal abuse. A date worthy of note, I feel."

  "Yeah, all right. I won't mention the bit when you sent an EMP through the entire facility. How many missiles did you put into their reactor anyway?"

  "Just one," said Judas Harrow from the sensor workstation. "But it was a big one."

  "No shit." Red stood up and suppressed a groan. Her companions might have had a relatively uneventful time of things, but she had taken some serious physical punishment in the past couple of days. Now that she had stopped running and her adrenaline levels had dropped, her body's complaints were finally making themselves heard. "Okay, I'm going to go and check on Joash. Godolkin, it's time to give Sibbecai the good news. I'll let you do the honours."

  "Thy will be done." Godolkin touched a control. The message was preset, a coded quantum signal narrow-banded to one specific crypt-key. It wouldn't go directly to Sibbecai's flagship, but instead to a relay buoy he had left for her. "Transmission sent, Blasphemy."

  "Good lad. That should cheer the toothy old bugger up." She stretched, hearing clicks as her spine straightened, and then headed to the rear hatch. "Right, I'm off to the infirmary. Let me know as soon as you hear anything."

  "As you wish," Godolkin replied. Then, very quietly: "Be gentle with him."

  Red grinned at the back of his head, but said nothing.

  Fury's thre
e decks were circular, stacked one on top of another like plates in the centre of its egg shaped pressure hull. The control deck, which housed the bridge, systems monitors rooms and comms hub, was the middle deck of the three. To get to the infirmary Red had to go up a level.

  She left the bridge and paced around the inner corridor, the plain steel mesh of the deck cold under her bare feet. The boots she had worn on Dedanas were in the cleaning unit along with the rest of her outfit, and until all the bits of Utan Bas Loman had been ultrasonically scrubbed from the soles, Red had decided to go without them. Ever since she had been forced to leave the wrecked Crimson Hunter back in the forests of Ashkelon, she had only owned one decent pair of boots.

  Her present outfit was uncharacteristically plain, too - just a pair of leather trousers and a vest of black fabric-metal. After the excesses of Ulai, and everything that had brought her to the Periphery, she felt like dressing down for a while.

  The access tube between the decks had no closable doors. Red just ducked around to the nearest opening and stepped through. Instantly she was weightless, her stomach flip-flopping at the sudden change in gravity. The tube was kept at zero g; even if the ship landed and shut off its own artificial gravity, anyone stepping into the tube would find themselves in free fall.

  She grabbed a handhold and shoved down on it slightly, letting the motion carry her up to the hab deck, hitting the deck already walking. Fury's pressure cylinder was so small - each deck was barely twenty metres across - that every compartment was pretty much right next to every other. She was at the infirmary hatch in seconds.

  Joash was lying on one of the medical pallets, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. He'd discarded most of the rags he'd been wearing down in the mines and cleaned himself up while Red had been on the bridge. For a moment, before he noticed she was there, Red found herself looking with some appreciation at what his lack of clothing revealed.

  "Well, hi there," she said finally.

  He started, his eyes snapping open. When he saw her he immediately swung himself off the pallet and dropped to his knees. "Holy one," he gasped

  "Come on, Joash, none of that." She stepped forward and took him by the elbow, helping him up. He wasn't entirely steady on his feet yet. "You should know I don't do the Saint Scarlet thing these days."

  "My father said as much."

  She watched as he leaned back against the pallet. He must have been a man of ferocious strength, both physical and mental, to survive as long as he had in Grota's mines, but he had been at his limits when Fury's missile had shattered the refinery's power plant. After the lights had gone out he had fought his way to freedom on sheer rage, but that had faded long before Red had gotten him to the docking chamber and onto the ship. She'd had to drag him the last few metres by his ankles.

  He was looking better now. Much better, Red decided, and then realised that her eyes were fixed on his naked chest again.

  She tore her gaze away. "No problem. How are you feeling?"

  "Unsteady," he replied. "The deck feels as if it's moving."

  Red came over to sit on the pallet next to him, hopping up onto it and swivelling around to put her back against the wall. "It is moving," she told him. "The dampers are set really low. Sneck, if you think this is bad, wait until we drop out of superlight. I'll make sure Godolkin gives you a yell, so you can grab hold of something."

  He nodded. "Holy one, you know I can't begin to thank you for this-"

  "Joash, don't even go there. Your dad saved my bacon back at Irutrea, and a lot of other people owe him their lives too. Humans, mutants... There was no way I wasn't going to help."

  "I'm surprised he asked you." Joash folded his arms tightly across his chest. There were scars there, whip marks, by the looks of them, and Red wondered if he was trying to hide them from her. "My father ran covert operations for the Tenebrae before he joined Xandos Dathan. Back then, if a team was captured they were considered dead."

  "Well, maybe he's lightened up since then. Anyway, he didn't ask me - he didn't even know I was in the Periphery. I heard Ascha's message too."

  He looked around at her sharply. "How? It was-"

  "Encrypted, I know." Red spread her hands. "What can I say? Tapping into the comms network is pretty much essential these days, if I fancy staying alive." She smiled. "And it's one of the things I'm very, very good at."

  He raised an eyebrow. "I'm sure there are many others."

  "Oh," Red purred. "You'd be surprised..."

  Joash started to speak, but was instantly drowned out by a crackle of static from the internal sounders. Fury's internal communications net had been jolted badly when the ship had first crashed on Ashkelon, and had never quite recovered. It always spat out a second's white noise before a new call came through.

  Harrow's voice followed it. "Holy one?"

  "Christ," she hissed under her breath. "I really wish people stop calling me that..." As far as Red was concerned, she was about the least holy person she knew. "What is it, Jude?"

  "We have an answer from the relay buoy. Commander Sibbecai sends his most heartfelt thanks and a set of co-ordinates. Godolkin is setting the jump computer now."

  Red took a deep breath, then slid down from the pallet. She shouldn't have been flirting anyway, not with a man who had just lost his wife, and who probably still worshipped her as a saint. "Thanks Jude, that's great work. Where's Sibbecai now?"

  "Haggai, holy one. The broken planet."

  There had been a time, many centuries earlier, when Haggai had been a very pleasant world indeed.

  It was a small planet back then, yet dense enough to provide a healthy gravitational field. It rolled around its sun at a distance that made its surface temperature exceptionally comfortable for human life, and an axial tilt of less than ten degrees gave it calm, even seasons. There was life there, both plant and animal, but nothing very dangerous or toxic, and all the living matter on Haggai was based on chemicals and proteins that could be safely ingested by humans and mutants alike. In a universe of harsh extremes, it was a rare jewel, a little paradise rimward of the Fornax Wilds.

  That had been a long time ago, before the Bloodshed. When that awful, genocidal conflict had erupted across the galaxy, Haggai suddenly found itself in the terrible position of being strategically valuable.

  No world wants to be valuable in a war. Especially a war which, in its last days, had escalated to the use of extinction level weaponry. Haggai had paid the ultimate price for being useful: according to what few records survived from that turbulent time, someone had decided to reduce its strategic value with a planet cracker.

  Nobody remembered who. In the end, it really didn't matter. Haggai was left a ruin.

  Red had been warned about what it was like, had read the data files from Fury's database. Still, she couldn't help but curse when it first appeared on her forward holo. She'd seen worlds razed before, their populations slaughtered, their biospheres irrevocably wrecked. While these worlds had been destroyed in terms of their ability to support life, Haggai had been physically shattered. When Omega Fury decelerated from superlight, it did so alongside a globe that had been split entirely apart.

  Great shards of stone hung in space, unmoving, their ragged tips still pointing inwards towards the lost core of Haggai, their flattened outer ends still forming a nightmare jigsaw of lifeless, desiccated crust. The planet had been reduced to a storm of shattered rock by the cracker's detonation, millions upon millions of fragments held by their combined gravity into a sickening parody of the world's original shape. It was as though a globe of delicate porcelain had been dropped onto a hard floor, with the very moment of its destruction frozen on camera: a split second capture of dissolution on a planetary scale.

  Fury was drawing closer to one of the crust fragments. Red brought up a close view on her holo and saw mountains, and the rough edges of what must have once been oceans, scanning beneath her. If she wore a vacuum shroud, she realised, she could walk on that wreck of a planet, kick
over the dusty bones of the billions who had been living there when the cracker hit the equator, and began, with a series of shaped antimatter charges, to blast itself right down into the core.

  She sagged back into the weapons throne. "What a snecking mess."

  Judas Harrow was still in the sensor station on the far side of the bridge. "I'm not picking up any hard returns," he reported. "Actually, that's not entirely true. All I'm picking up is hard returns, swarms of them. The debris is overloading our sense-engines."

  "That," growled Godolkin, "leaves us vulnerable. We will not be able to detect an enemy until they either engage their drives or launch weapons. In either case, this is a perfect spot in which to be fatally ambushed."

  "No one's going to ambush us." Red leaned back in the throne, trying to ease a crick out of her neck. "Sibbecai said he was going to be here, and he will."

  "Shall I engage the shadow web?"

  "Nah." The web was Fury's stealth system, a layer of specialised armour that rendered it almost invisible to every kind of detection, up to and including visible light. "You used it so much on Dedanas it almost drained the power core. Besides, we don't want to go skulking around - we're here to meet an old friend, and you don't do that in disguise."

  Godolkin made an unhappy sound, but kept his council. Red decided not to say anything else until it became really necessary - while the Iconoclast was piloting the ship in the midst of this frozen maelstrom, she didn't want to break his concentration.