Manticore Reborn

by Peter J Evans

"Just a wild guess," Red said thickly. "My corpse."

  6. CHORAZIN

  There was a blood chapel aboard Persephone. It dated from the days when the ship had been part of a Tenebrae fleet stationed near Iricos, or so Sibbecai claimed. A relic from the days before Saint Scarlet rose from her thousand-year slumber, and told the Tenebrae at Pyre that they'd been getting it wrong all these years.

  "It's been sealed, Saint, I assure you." The faceless commander was using a series of crypt-discs on the locking panel as Red watched, breaking the code sector by sector. "The original discs were smashed after Pyre. We abandoned that part of our faith just as you decreed."

  "Which makes you the exception, Commander," said Godolkin. "Most Tenebrae still embrace the shedding of blood in her name."

  "Old habits die hard," replied Sibbecai. The locking panel gave a final chime, and the door ground open.

  Red watched the panels slide rustily aside, and grimaced. "I didn't decree a bloody thing, Sibbecai. After what I'd seen on Pyre, I didn't give a sneck about the Tenebrae or anything they did, and that's what I told them. Just to leave me out of it." She sniffed. The chapel certainly smelled unused, reeking more of dust than blood. "Whatever. As long as it's secure."

  She stepped past Sibbecai and went in, looking around the gloomy place as she did so. It was mainly dark beyond the door; a few lumes were blinking on in the chapel's corners, but some seemed to have failed over the years, and even those that were working didn't look to be set very high. Then again, Red reflected, the rites that had taken place here weren't the kind that were best seen in strong light.

  The chapel was hexagonal, like many compartments on this class of ship, its six walls curving up and narrowing as they rose, meeting in a point many metres above her head. A spiked brazier hung down from that point at the end of a long chain, swaying very slightly, and below it was a ceremonial dais, carved with ancient runes and curving channels. That, she knew all too well, would be where a chained human sacrifice would be bled, his throat ripped out by Tenebrae adepts wearing fake vampire fangs.

  It was a sickening thought. Considering how she was already feeling about things, she began to wonder if the chapel was really the best place to conduct this briefing, secure or not.

  She found a bench seat at the edge of the chapel and sat down, leaning back against the dark metal wall. Godolkin had already entered; she could see him padding forward around the dais, warily checking the corners, glaring into the shadows. He plainly didn't want to be here, or even away from Fury, but this was important. Red wouldn't have subjected him to it if it hadn't been.

  To an Iconoclast, walking into a Tenebrae blood chapel must have been like sitting down for tea in Satan's dining room.

  Judas Harrow, of course, had seen it all before. Red sometimes forgot that the young mutant had been an active member of the Tenebrae before he had revived her on Wodan. He'd only been a novice adept, but she knew he'd participated in rites. He'd even offered her the use of a pair of those steel fangs to bleed him with, before he discovered that she had the real thing.

  She saw Harrow sit down on the bench next to hers and noticed the way Godolkin watched him from the shadows. The two men would never be friends, but they had been getting along reasonably well in the last few months. Just being here, though, could set all that back a long way.

  The sooner she had them out of here, the better. "Sibbecai, where's this lieutenant of yours? This place is freaking me out."

  "A moment, Saint." He was still at the doorway, peering out into the corridor. A second later Red heard footfalls, and looked up as a shadow fell across the dais.

  "You're late," she said.

  "Forgive me, holy one." The man walked in, carefully skirting the dais with an expression of slight distaste.

  Red looked him up and down. He was a solid, compact mutant, neatly bearded, dressed in a long coat of black fabric-metal over a Tenebrae officer's uniform. Like Harrow and Joash, he could easily have passed for human, and probably had biomorphic implants to make sure he could get through Iconoclast detection. If Sibbecai went back to running covert ops, more and more of his agents would end up with those.

  He stopped in front of her and gave her a slightly languid bow. "Lieutenant Cormoran, my lady. I can only apologise for holding you up, but this is a difficult part of the ship to get to. The way isn't as easy as it once was, especially when one is forbidden to ask for directions."

  "I think the Saint's request for privacy is a valid one, Lieutenant." Sibbecai touched a control, and the door slid closed again. Blinking in the gloom, Red found herself hoping that it was easier to get out of the chapel than it had been getting in. "These rumours have already done untold damage."

  Cormoran stiffened. "Sir, I take full responsibility. Nerichau has always been a reliable and observant operative, but whatever happened to him on Chorazin must have addled his wits. I should have edited his report."

  Red shook her head. "Don't be hard on the old guy, Cormoran. He saw what he saw."

  The Lieutenant frowned, puzzled. "But my lady, he swore that he saw your corpse. Was it some kind of fake? A clone?"

  "No," Red sighed. "It was mine."

  It had all started on Vauvus, a colony world on the Accord's coreward edge, some weeks after Red had escaped from Magadan. She had stopped there for supplies - Fury's previous owners had been a crew of Omega Warriors, the enhanced Iconoclast troopers created by Lord Tactician Saulus. The Omegas might have been able to survive on a few mealsticks and some lukewarm water, but Red and Harrow couldn't. Even Godolkin was looking out of sorts by the time Fury set down.

  Red had left the two men to work on the ship while she explored the settlements around the starport. She was gone little more than half a day, but by the time she came back her companions were missing.

  The ship was still on its landing pad, undamaged, but Godolkin and Harrow were nowhere to be found.

  Red made swift enquiries, and before long was on the trail of a ship that had joined Fury on its landing pad shortly after she had left. The other vessel had made no attempt to mask its ion wake, and Red was able, after a few minutes getting to grips with piloting Fury alone, to track it all the way back to its home world.

  It took about fifty hours. On the way, she started getting violent headaches.

  Red had suffered pain before, but nothing like this. Each burst, although only seconds long, was liquid fire scorching a track through her skull. As if that wasn't bad enough, she could feel the source of the bursts, could taste it like blood on her tongue. Again, there was no attempt at concealment. Whoever had taken her companions was torturing them, and somehow beaming their agonies through space, directly into Red's brain.

  It was a brutal, insane thing to be doing, and it really hurt.

  Red had followed the ion wake all the way back to a gas giant planet that Fury's database had called Salecah. There, on a bizarre orbital platform that seemed to be made entirely of rust, she had come face to face with the woman who had been ritually electrocuting Harrow and Godolkin for the past two days.

  "She called herself Brite Red," she told Sibbecai. "But it was me. A version of me, from the distant future. I don't know how far - one minute she was talking about a thousand years, the next a thousand lifetimes." She shook her head sadly. "I dunno. She was mad. Totally insane."

  "Impossible," muttered Cormoran. He was standing by the dais, a look of complete incomprehension on his dark face. "No one can travel in time."

  "I could. I did." Red sighed. "Back in my day we could do it, in a limited way. I guess Brite learned how to do it all over again. She had a lot of time to work it out, I suppose."

  "You're certain?"

  "Take a look at Nerichau, then ask me again. Anyway, I just had to look into her eyes to see she was me. I tried to tell myself that it was a trick, but it wasn't. My future self was standing right in front of me."

  "She had built the orbital platform to house a time engine," said Godolkin. "She used us to lur
e the Blasphemy into a trap. Omega Fury was shot from the sky."

  Cormoran looked horrified. Red couldn't tell how Sibbecai was looking, but he spoke first.

  "She tried to kill you?"

  "That's why she came back. She didn't like the life she'd led for all those years, and had decided to wipe it all out by travelling back in time and killing me."

  "That's deranged."

  "I think I told her that." Red got to her feet. "Look, people try to kill me all the time, okay? It wasn't that much of a stretch to imagine some barmy version of me travelling back in time to sneck me up."

  Cormoran was walking away around the dais as if Red's revelation was too much for him to hear. Sibbecai watched him for a few seconds, then turned back to her. "And what happened?"

  "Oh, nothing much. We fought, I killed her, I grabbed the boys and bugged out. End of story."

  "The corpse," Cormoran was muttering. "It was frozen, awaiting dissection. The throat was-" He broke off. "And you did that?"

  "Oh, will you people forget about her?" Red put her hands on her hips. "You're kind of missing the point here. If the Archaeotechs have got Brite's body, that means they went to Salecah to get it."

  "The Archaeotechs aren't working on some kind of anti-mutant weapon," said Harrow, getting up. "Not directly. But if your people were aged by a failed experiment, it can only mean that the humans have salvaged Brite Red's time engine."

  "Give that boy a lolly," Red nodded. "A dead version of me isn't any use to anybody, but a working time machine? Just imagine the Iconoclasts being able to travel in time, maybe all the way back to when mutants were first created, or to critical points in the Bloodshed, or when Jude woke me up on Wodan. And then tell me how safe you feel."

  "I should have seen this coming. I shouldn't have just left her there, or that snecking base of hers. I should have fragged it from orbit, poured flayer missiles into the bloody thing until it came to bits."

  Red was in Fury's refectory, slumped over a table. She, Harrow and Godolkin had retreated back to the ship while Sibbecai and his lieutenants decided what to do. The stealth ship had been berthed aboard Persephone, in one of the battleship's sprawling hangar decks. A space had been cleared for it among the Vampyr assault craft still docked there.

  Godolkin had gone back to the bridge, while Harrow had stayed in the refectory with Red. He'd tried to make coffee, but the galley facilities aboard Fury weren't really up to it. The lukewarm, brownish liquid he had been able to produce still sat at her elbow, untasted.

  "You weren't to know," Harrow told her. "We were all injured, the ship damaged. There was no reason to do anything other than escape."

  Red peered up at him from under one arm. "Thanks, Jude, but that's bollocks and we both know it. Just because the bomb doesn't blow you up doesn't mean that you should leave it for someone else."

  She straightened up, arching her back to ease the tension in her neck muscles. "And now look. The bloody Iconoclasts are trying to build a time machine, and it's all my fault." She saw the way he was looking at her, and spoke before he could. "No, really. Brite Red's me. So either way you look at it..."

  "She's not you. You said yourself, there's no way you'd turn out like that."

  "Is there not?" Red wasn't so sure. So far she'd only lived a perfectly normal lifetime, albeit with a twelve-hundred year hiatus, but she already knew that her body's powers of repair were quite phenomenal. If those powers extended to the regeneration of damage due to aging, as well as from people hitting her, then it was perfectly possible that she wouldn't age at all.

  She'd be immortal.

  The idea horrified her. To never grow old, never die, while those around her faded away. While even the stars themselves grew dim... Given that, she could quite easily see Brite's madness on her own horizon.

  Maybe the woman had been trying to do her a favour by sparing her the future.

  Red cursed under her breath and rubbed her eyes. "Well, right now I'm halfway to going bananas just waiting. How long does it take to make a decision like this?"

  "If Commander Sibbecai had the forces he'd commanded at Irutrea, it would already be made."

  "Maybe I should go up to the bridge." Red pushed her chair back and stood up. "Jolly them along a bit."

  Harrow made a face. "I wouldn't advise it."

  "Drink your coffee," she grinned, then started as a blast of static filled the refectory.

  Godolkin's voice followed it. "I have word from Commander Sibbecai, Blasphemy. Your presence is requested."

  "Thank sneck for that. Did they tell you what they are going to do?"

  "They did not, but the fleet is redeploying. All ships are moving out of the debris field and charging their light-drives."

  That could only mean one thing. Sibbecai and his damaged, depleted battlegroup were going to attack the Archaeotechs.

  Sibbecai called a briefing as soon as the fleet went to superlight. Persephone's main briefing hall was gone, ripped away by weapons fire during the battle of Irutrea, so rather than use facilities on any of the other ships in the fleet he had instead opened up a secondary tactical chamber at the base of the battleship's bridge tower. It was smaller than the original hall, about the same size as the blood chapel, but it wasn't crowded. Even with two representatives from each ship in the fleet, there were several benches left unoccupied.

  That, more than anything, gave Red cause for concern. Sibbecai was proposing a full-scale attack on an Archaeotech stronghold with six capital ships and two packs of Vampyrs.

  Cormoran had put together a holographic model of the Chorazin temple-lab. As soon is it appeared, Red realised that her mental picture of the place was way off: she had expected it to be one single structure, a vast Iconoclast cathedral raised to the worship of ancient technologies and forbidden science. The hologram in front of her showed a complex sprawl of buildings, a circular mass of towers and ziggurats that looked more like some vast industrial facility than any temple Red had seen.

  "This," Sibbecai barked, "is the main structure of the temple-lab. As you can see, the humans have decentralised its construction. There's no clear pattern to it, which makes a tactical strike impossible. We can't be sure exactly where the time engine is being kept, or whether it might have been moved. So, to be certain of destroying the correct lab, we would need to vaporise the entire base."

  "Impossible," hissed a woman to Red's left, her head a pallid fusion of squid and serpent. "We don't have the firepower. Besides, the humans know they have been infiltrated - their protection fleet will be on full alert-"

  "That's more correct than you know," said Cormoran glumly. "As Commander Sibbecai told you, this is the main structure of the temple-lab, but far from the only structure."

  He touched a control icon, and a broad dome blinked into life above the model. It wasn't quite a complete disc - there was a low, crescent shaped segment missing from one edge, making it look like a biscuit with a bite taken out of it.

  A moment later another feature appeared - a ring of jagged material completely encircling the structures beneath the dome.

  "Chorazin is dangerously close to Ochaos, its parent star. The planet isn't tidally locked, as you might expect, but instead has a ferocious spin. Basically, you are looking at a world with a two hour rotational period, and a mean surface temperature of over fifteen hundred degrees.

  "As you might expect, this necessitates considerable shielding. The lab is built inside a crater almost two thousand metres across, with a rim wall over a hundred metres high." He pointed at the dome. "This is the heat shield. It's cast from bonded duralloy and coated with a three-atom layer of neutronium in continuous suspension. That doesn't sound like a lot, but a teaspoon of neutron-star material weighs about a hundred million tonnes. Even in such a fine coating, the shield has an incredible mass."

  "A heat-sink?" Red asked.

  There was a moment's silence, in which Red noticed that everyone was looking at her. She'd spoken without thinking, as she oft
en did. To her, the statement had seemed obvious.

  "Really, it's not as daft as it sounds. Neutron-star material isn't a solid; it's more like soup, and they have to hold it in suspension or it would run down off the dome and puddle round the crater wall. Or maybe it would go up - it's bloody weird stuff. In either case, all that mass will soak up the sun's heat like a sponge." She put her face close to the model, poking the hologram with her finger. "I'm just wondering how they get rid of it again."

  "Here," said Cormoran. A protrusion on the dome's surface, just above the cut-out, flared to attract her attention.

  Red looked up at him. "You're kidding."

  "No." The protrusion grew downwards, through the dome and the structures beneath, extending into a series of rods and rings, and finally a spherical structure that could only have been buried several hundred metres under the crater floor.

  "This ball here is the temple-lab's primary reactor. From what we've been able to extrapolate, roughly a tenth of its output goes towards powering the base itself. The rest is for this." He indicated the protrusion again. "A cooling laser."

  Red whistled. The laser must have been huge, and insanely powerful. In terms of raw energy transfer it would outstrip the fusion lances mounted in Persephone's bow, and those mighty weapons could only fire for a few seconds at a time. To keep the temple-lab from melting, the cooling laser would have to fire continuously, pumping heat from the shield out into space.

  No wonder the other Iconoclast divisions looked on Archaeotechs with distrust. Even to Red, this looked halfway to devilry.

  Cormoran rotated the view, letting the shield's opening move past those watching. "This is the only weak point. It's the entrance to the starport, which is here, under the lip of the dome. It's also the place with the highest concentration of defensive firepower, so please don't start thinking about flying under the shield for a strafing run. Oh, and there's a very good chance the humans will be able to direct the output of the cooling laser, at least partially."