"So what you're saying is," the squid headed woman muttered, "that we have to attack something that we can't find and can't reach, on a world that will immolate us if we so much as set foot on it, while being fired on by a weapon that rivals the fires of Hell itself."
"Indeed," replied Sibbecai. "And with only six ships."
"Seven," said Durham Red. "And right now, I reckon Omega Fury is the most important weapon you've got."
"A most typical display," Godolkin told her after she'd related the briefing's outcome. "Your arrogance, Blasphemy, is without limit."
They were in one of the equipment stores on Fury's lower deck. The Iconoclast was sorting through the ship's meagre supply of guns, but Red could see that he wasn't happy with any of them. He'd lost his holy weapon and silver blade a while ago, on Magadan, and it was clear that the Omega warriors who had once owned this ship didn't favour such devices. All the man had been able to find were cut down bolters and plasma derringers.
Red, on the other hand, was more than happy with what she had. Most of her original arsenal had been lost when Crimson Hunter had been abandoned on Ashkelon, but Sibbecai had been happy to provide her with some replacements. She now had a matched pair of particle magnums on her belt, slab-sided pistols as long as carbines, with extended power cores. She wasn't sure where the mutant commander had found the guns - most Tenebrae weapons fired frag-shells - but she was glad he had.
"Flattery will get you everywhere," she told Godolkin, watching him checking the charge on a plasma rifle. "And anyway, I didn't say I was the important thing - it's Fury that's going to get the job done, if anything can."
Harrow was off to one side, poring over a dataslate. Lieutenant Cormoran had downloaded a tactical map of the temple-lab onto it. "Holy one, all our efforts will be wasted if the Archaeotechs have moved the time engine."
"I know." She stepped out of the equipment store and back into the staging area to give Godolkin more room. "I'm hoping it's too big to move around easily. And it's been a few days since Nerichau and his team were down there, so maybe the heat's died down a little."
"It's possible," said Harrow. "I'm unfamiliar with Archaeotech doctrine. They are rumoured to operate very differently from other Iconoclast divisions."
Godolkin emerged, clutching the plasma rifle and fixing spare charge packs to his battle harness. "They do. Still, I would council that our mission to Chorazin is suicide. Waiting for Jubal to rejoin Sibbecai's fleet would be more prudent. Then we could make a conventional attack and have some chance of success."
"There's no time," said Red. "And anyway, that would just get a lot of people killed on both sides, and I'd like to avoid that if possible." She scowled at him. "All I want to do is scrap that time engine. Wholesale slaughter's not on my agenda for today."
"Of course," began Harrow, "we may have already prevailed."
Red glanced around at him. "Say what?"
The mutant finished checking his map and clipped the dataslate to his belt. "There is a school of thought, holy one, in which one must assume that we succeed in this task. The Archaeotechs will never make the time engine functional, because if they do so in the future they would have already travelled back into the past and destroyed us. The very fact that we are alive tells us that Chorazin falls."
"A temporal paradox," said Godolkin thoughtfully.
Red snorted. "Jude, that makes my head hurt even worse than when Brite was zapping me. Besides, I don't think Sibbecai would go for it."
"Almost certainly not."
"Anyway, this is going to bloody work. As long as no one screws up, we could be in and out before anyone notices." She hauled the magnums from her belt, spinning them around her fingers to test their balance. "Don't give me that look, Godolkin. I know what I'm doing. We've got a couple of things going for us."
"Which are?"
"One, nobody likes Archaeotechs. From what I hear, even other Iconoclasts think they're untrustworthy, so they probably won't be able to rustle up much of a protection fleet. Nothing Sibbecai can't handle for a few minutes, as long as he doesn't get too heroic."
Harrow looked quizzically at her. "And the second thing?"
"You're standing in it," she grinned. "Come on, we'll be making the first drop soon. Better get Cormoran and his people onboard."
7. SHOW TIME
Aura Lydexia was in the dissection chamber, a sampling blade in her hand, when the alarm sounded.
She had managed to retrieve one of the mutant infiltrators from the Custodes stasis tubes so she could run a series of tissue samples, although the officer in charge of the facility insisted that a full autopsy could only be performed if he, or an officer of equal rank, present. Lydexia wasn't happy about that, but there was nothing she could do. The mutant wasn't a test subject, but an agent of the enemy, and thus came under the jurisdiction of the Custodes. Any autopsy performed on him would be for the purposes of security.
Lydexia had decided to keep the Custodes officer out of Chronotech for the moment, and do everything she could by non-invasive means. To really find out anything she would need to open the carcass - of that there was no doubt - but there were tests that could be done on a subject and leave no marks.
Especially when he was already dead.
The mutant was lying on a drain table; one of four Lydexia had set up in the dissection chamber. The Chronotech facility was a small structure, off to one side of the primary complex, and didn't have the facilities of the less esoteric disciplines. In fact, Lydexia had built it almost from scratch by commandeering a redundant high-energy testing plant that had been due for demolition. The dissection chamber had originally been a small chapel, built into one of the plant's two laboratory blocks, until Lydexia had refitted it at considerable personal cost. In contrast, some of the Bio-weapons chapter boasted vast arrays of surgical equipment, capable of dissecting hundreds of bodies at a time, and direct access to a fusion furnace so the remains could be disposed of easily. Chronotech was a far more modest affair.
Lydexia could understand that. Her primary chapter was Xenotechnology, the study of alien devices, and thus well respected and equipped. Her own specialty of Chronotechnoloy, however, was a branch of the main chapter that seldom saw any advance. Most Archaeotechs regarded it as a waste of effort. Before the Salecah object, Lydexia had spent most of her days on pure theory.
It was hardly surprising. Time travel was a rare occurrence; so rare that it was debatable it had ever really happened. It gave Lydexia little to work on, and the Savants in charge of her chapter had few reasons to divert resources her way.
That, she knew, could change. But at the moment the Salecah artefact was just an alien device of unproven purpose. The chapter Savants would take a lot of convincing before they would believe Lydexia had a time machine in her lab.
An autopsy on the four mutants who had felt its effects would be a start, but that was clearly out of bounds. Lydexia leaned close to the pale, frost rimmed body with the blade held steady, and told herself that tissue samples would be as good a place to start as any. If the results were good, perhaps she could petition the Custodes to let her take the corpse apart properly.
As the point of the blade touched skin, the alarm gonged into life.
Lydexia cursed and straightened up, dropping the blade onto the drain table. Her comm-linker was already buzzing, so she snapped it free of her belt and flipped it on. "Gyor, what's that infernal racket?"
"Forgive me, doctor-captain, but it's starting again."
Lydexia cursed and bolted for the ladder.
Gyor and the other researchers would be in the observation chamber one level up. There were cargo elevators, but Lydexia was young and quite capable of clambering up the caged ladder in less time than it took to get into the lift. She was in the observation chamber within half a minute of the alarm.
As soon as she got there she could see what was causing the panic through the great transpex windows that faced out onto the lightning vault. The time
engine, bolted into its frame at the apex of the tower, was spinning furiously.
The last time this had happened, five unauthorised helots had been in the vault. One had just managed to get free of the chamber, but the others hadn't been so lucky. It was only when their desiccated bodies had been examined in more detail that anyone realised they were mutants.
Far more than helots were in the vault now: a researcher team had been checking the power feeds when the engine had started up. Lydexia could see them scattering from the base of the tower, students and helots running with them, battering at the armoured hatches sealing them in.
There was a noise coming through the transpex. A sibilant murmur, like a million voices whispering at once. It was getting louder, the voices growing enraged.
Lydexia dropped into a vacant seat at the main sequencing board, quickly scanning the icons flashing there. "Gyor, slave full control of primary power to me at this board. And someone tell those poor beggars down in the vault that panicking won't do them any good - I'm working as fast as I can."
The board came alive under her hands. Lydexia had designed most of its systems, so it didn't take her long to make sense of the alert icons. The time engine had indeed started up on its own again, and it was dragging power through the feeds faster than the vault's cabling could supply it. There were lines melting out beyond the transpex - something was going to give way, and soon.
Not soon enough for the researchers in there with it.
Lydexia began tapping icons, redirecting the tower's inputs. There was no point trying to shut off the power; that hadn't worked last time, leading only to a catastrophic backwash from the engine, flooding the vault with chronoplasts. This time, she was going to let the machine do exactly what it wanted to. Up to a point.
The vault was a cone shaped structure twenty metres high, and flattened off at the roof. Another truncated cone extended from the ceiling, far smaller and flatter. It housed a huge array of sensing and control equipment, most of which protruded downwards towards the tower in a forest of spines and dishes. Lydexia opened up the control sequence for the array, dropping every damper she had and bringing up a forcewall. In moments, the spinning time engine was surrounded by a hazy cylinder of liquid green light.
The dampers and forcewalls were exactly the same devices used by starships. Lydexia had requisitioned parts of dreadnought class or higher when she was designing the vault; ordinarily, the haze of energy surrounding the tower would have been proofing killships from Tenebrae antimat fire.
Alone, they probably wouldn't stop the chronoplasts, but with the dampers at full charge...
Lydexia cut the power.
The vault went white. A sphere of raw power had appeared at the centre of the time engine, impossibly small, but bright enough to fill the entire chamber with glare. Distantly, Lydexia could hear the researchers screaming.
The dampers were filling with energy discharge. Lydexia could see their readouts on her board; eight bars of green light, turning scarlet in front of her eyes. As she watched, the fourth damper went offline, filled with excess power until its circuitry melted. The energy discharge would be vented into the cooling laser, but the damper itself was history.
Another failed, and another. Two more.
The last three were on the verge of collapse when the light went out.
Slowly, the bars began to shrink back to green. Lydexia turned off the forcewall and ordered a medical team to the lightning vault.
None of the Researchers had been injured. Just to be on the safe side, Lydexia ordered all connections to the time engine severed while the ruined dampers were being replaced. It was a brutal decision to take, and reconnecting the cabling would take days, but she couldn't compromise the temple-lab's safety. If the engine started up again before the dampers were installed, anything could happen.
She requisitioned a secondary set of dampers as well, and was surprised at how readily her request was approved.
Not long after that she received a priority message from her chapter Savant, suggesting the two of them take tea in the refectory. Lydexia had been an Archaeotech long enough to know that such suggestions were not designed to be refused, and given the amount of trouble she was probably in already, she didn't think it prudent to start bucking tradition now. She changed quickly into a set of uniform robes, made a small devotion at her private chapel, and then headed across the temple-lab towards the Xenotech refectory.
On high days, the refectory was capable of feeding a thousand Archaeotechs at once, but when Lydexia entered it was very nearly empty. A small squad of Custodes ushered her in, their armour adorned with the closed eye symbol of their order, and two more led her through the ranks of benches to the high table. There, flanked by elite Custodes guards, sat Eucharis Gemello, savant-colonel of the Xenotech chapter.
Gemello stood as Lydexia approached the table. "Well met, doctor-captain."
"Savant-colonel." Lydexia bowed, and then sat where she was bidden. The two Custodes who had led her in moved silently away, leaving her alone on her side of the long table, and very much aware of how she had been positioned. Her back was to the door and the open vastness of the refectory.
Gemello was a wily leader, she knew that, but sometimes her psychology was a little obvious.
The savant-colonel raised a hand, and a helot scuttled forward with a tray. "Tea?" she asked.
Her voice was high, musical. Lydexia nodded silently, and watched while the helot poured black liquid into two tall glasses. When the servant was done he stepped away, moving into the shadows as if he had never been there.
The savant-colonel took a thumb-sized crystal of sugar and dropped it into her glass. She was dressed head to foot in her robes of office, cream and gold, with a tall headdress. When she reached for the glass she had to hold one trailing sleeve out of the way, in order not to sweep Lydexia's from the table.
"There was," she began, her voice a liquid purr, "an alert in your laboratory this afternoon."
Lydexia nodded silently.
"It was not the first."
"That's right, savant-colonel. There was another when the mutant infiltration team was there."
Gemello lifted her glass and sipped. "Hmm. I've read Captain Hirundo's report on that. He thinks it was a coincidence. Do you?"
Lydexia remained silent for a moment, and then shook her head. "I can't say for certain, but I don't think so. There's no record of what they did in the vault immediately before the artefact activated itself, but it's possible they triggered it."
"And it triggered again when Researcher-Lieutenant Septimus was close by. So is he a mutant in disguise, or just a fool who goes about pressing buttons at random?"
"Neither, savant-colonel. Septimus is..." She trailed off, staring at her glass of tea. "I'm sorry, I don't know. The artefact's control chains are so complex I could spend years mapping them. I can't say why it initiated when it did. Maybe it was coincidence, or maybe it has some intelligence and is actively trying to escape through time. The vault should be shielded against all forms of communication, but chronoplasts don't follow that kind of rule." She sat back. "I've yet to rule anything out, I'm afraid."
"I see." Gemello stroked her chin thoughtfully. She was old, Lydexia knew, but pure gene reclamation had regressed her body to that of a smooth skinned young woman. It was a fad popularised by the holy Patriarch himself, although rumours abounded about the extremes to which he had taken the process.
"Doctor-captain, there are those in the chapter that regard your specialty as an expensive folly. I've heard the word 'sinecure' bandied about more than once. However, you'll be pleased to know that I don't share these views."
Lydexia, unsure of how to react, lifted her glass and gulped down a mouthful of black tea. It was vile.
"In fact," Gemello continued, "I've forwarded a copy of your initial report to Ascension."
Suddenly, Lydexia's tea was trying to go down into her lungs. In her shock, she'd managed to breathe some of the
awful stuff in, and had to clamp down hard over a coughing fit. "What?" she croaked.
"Are you all right?"
"Fine." She cleared her throat and settled back, forcing herself to ignore the leaping tickle behind her sternum. "I'm fine. Ascension, you say?"
"Indeed. Admiral Caliban has already expressed an interest, and sends his personal congratulations. Lydexia, if you play this right, your star could be rising very fast indeed."
Something inside Lydexia soared, but she kept her expression calm, her voice level. "Thank you, savant-colonel. Of course, my loyalty is to the chapter and the division. I have no personal ambitions in the matter."
"Bullshit." Gemello's old young face creased in a smile. "Don't play yourself short, girl. This toy of yours could be a worthless trinket, or it could be the saving of mankind. But whatever it is, be aware that it's your toy. Don't let Ascension take it from you if it turns out to be a winner, and likewise have no surprise if it all goes wrong and the axe falls. You brought it here."
"I understand, savant-colonel. And thank you."
"Nothing to thank me for, doctor-captain. For good or ill, this is on your head. Just make sure it stays unplugged until those new dampers are in, yes?"
After the meeting, Lydexia went straight back to the dissection chamber. While she'd been away, one of her helots had activated a stasis shell on the occupied drain table so that the mutant she was working on wouldn't start to rot. Even with the massive refrigerating power of the cooling laser, the temple-lab could still get warm during Chorazin's hour long day.
While she was deactivating the shell, she put a linker call through to Commander Hirundo, asking him to contact her as soon as he was free. The reply came before the mutant was even defrosted. "Doctor-captain. It's good to hear from you."
"Thank you, commander."
"Although I've been hearing quite a lot about you, these past few days. Your new toy is turning some heads."
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