The Encoded Heart Read online

  DURHAM RED

  THE ENCODED HEART

  She nodded to the side as she said it, gesturing over the handrail. In spite of herself, the Iconoclast followed the gesture. Her eyes moved, just a fraction, but it was enough. Red launched herself forward, ducking under the bolter and striking the woman a massive, backhanded blow.

  The Iconoclast didn't even get a chance to fire. The swipe flipped her clear over the handrail.

  Red skidded to a halt, cursing herself. She'd acted purely on impulse again. For the crime the Iconoclast had committed up in the dome, she should have made the fight last longer. Made it hurt more.

  "Sneck it!" she exclaimed. "And I was getting thirsty, too."

  DURHAM RED

  -Peter J Evans-

  #1: THE UNQUIET GRAVE

  #2: THE OMEGA SOLUTION

  #3: THE ENCODED HEART

  #4: MANTICORE REBORN

  #5: BLACK DAWN

  JUDGE DREDD FROM 2000 AD BOOKS

  #1: DREDD VS DEATH

  Gordon Rennie

  #2: BAD MOON RISING

  David Bishop

  #3: BLACK ATLANTIC

  Simon Jowett & Peter J Evans

  #4: ECLIPSE

  James Swallow

  #5: KINGDOM OF THE BLIND

  David Bishop

  #6: THE FINAL CUT

  Matthew Smith

  #7: SWINE FEVER

  Andrew Cartmel

  #8: WHITEOUT

  James Swallow

  #9: PSYKOGEDDON

  Dave Stone

  JUDGE ANDERSON

  #1: FEAR THE DARKNESS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #2: RED SHADOWS - Mitchel Scanlon

  #3: SINS OF THE FATHER - Mitchel Scanlon

  MORE 2000 AD ACTION

  ROGUE TROOPER

  #1: CRUCIBLE - Gordon Rennie

  STRONTIUM DOG

  #1: BAD TIMING - Rebecca Levene

  FIENDS OF THE EASTERN FRONT - David Bishop

  #1: OPERATION VAMPYR

  #2: THE BLOOD RED ARMY

  #3: TWILIGHT OF THE DEAD

  THE ABC WARRIORS

  #1: THE MEDUSA WAR - Pat Mills & Alan Mitchell

  #2: RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINES - Mike Wild

  To the Middletons

  For a peaceful place

  In which to get away from all of this

  Durham Red created by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra.

  Special thanks to Dan Abnett and Mark Harrison for character and continuity of the Accord

  A 2000 AD Publication

  www.abaddonbooks.com

  www.2000adonline.com

  1098 7 65 4321

  Cover illustration by Mark Harrison.

  Copyright © 2005 Rebellion A/S. All rights reserved.

  All 2000 AD characters and logos © and TM Rebellion A/S. "Durham Red" is a trademark in the United States and other jurisdictions. "2000 AD" is a registered trademark in certain jurisdictions. All rights reserved. Used under licence.

  ISBN(.epub): 978-1-84997-069-3

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-110-2

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  DURHAM RED

  THE ENCODED HEART

  PETER J EVANS

  The Legend of Durham Red

  It is written that in that year of 2150, the skies rained down nuclear death, and every family and clan lost father and brothers and sons. The Strontium choked our beloved homeworld and brought forth mutants, squealing and twisted things.

  Yet such mutants were not weak things to be crushed underfoot, for the same radiation that had created them warped their bodies, making them stronger than any normal human. They became hated and feared by all, and were herded into ghettos and imprisoned in vast camps. There they plotted rebellion and dreamed of freedom amongst their own kind.

  Some, it is told, were able to escape from the shadows of ruined Earth, to join the feared Search/Destroy Agency. They tracked wanted criminals on worlds too dangerous for regular enforcement officers. They became known as the Strontium Dogs.

  The one they call Durham Red became an S/D Agent to escape the teeming ghettos of her devastated homeland. Shunned even by her own kind because of a foul mutant blood-thirst, she soon found that her unsurpassed combat skills served her well as a Strontium Dog. The years of continuous slaughter took their toll, however, and the tales relate that in the end Red willingly entered the deep sleep of cryogenic suspension, determined to let a few years go by without her.

  All know of the unexpected twist that the legend took. Her cryo-tube malfunctioned. Durham Red woke up twelve hundred years late.

  While she slept, the enmity between humans and mutants had exploded into centuries of total war, leaving the galaxy a shattered shell, home only to superstition and barbarism. Billions of oppressed mutants now worship Saint Scarlet of Durham - the mythologised image of Red herself! The bounty hunter from Milton Keynes has now become almost a messiah figure for mutantkind - and a terrifying blasphemy in the eyes of humans.

  Half the galaxy is looking to her for bloody salvation. The other half is determined to destroy her at any cost. The future is a nightmare, and Durham Red is trapped right in the middle of it...

  1. INITIAL CONDITIONS

  Sorrelier was dreaming when the alert sounded.

  He sat up, breathing hard, glancing about wildly. The bedchamber was pulsing like a live thing, the jewelled walls swelling and contracting as he watched, a dizzying counterpoint to the beat of his racing heart. For a moment the sight baffled him, left him wondering if he had actually awoken, or whether the dream had simply moved into another, even stranger phase. Horror gripped him. His mouth, dry as dust, strained to articulate a single word.

  "Lise," he gasped, finally.

  A shadow appeared at the end of the bed. Lise, his most trusted sylph, had stepped out of the darkness. Sorrelier saw her eyes flick up to the ceiling of the chamber, where the illuminated panels pulsed softly in time with the alarm.

  He let out a long breath. The walls were still solid after all. Only the shadows rose and fell as the lights echoed the alarm's bleating.

  He sagged back and shut his eyes. "The bitch is here, isn't she?"

  Lise didn't answer. There was much she was capable of, but speech wasn't among her talents.

  Sorrelier shivered. He felt empty. The dream had been a strange one, sadistic and surreal, but that was only to be expected. He had taken great pains to design it that way.

  Something about a child, he remembered.

  The alarm was getting on his nerves, fracturing his memory of the dream. "Off!" he snapped, stilling its noise instantly. Through his closed eyelids, Sorrelier saw the chamber's lights grow steady.

  A child, yes. An infant of uncertain gender; smooth-skinned and scrubbed, clad in brilliant silks. A skull-cap of gleaming metal had covered the child's head from the brows upwards, and even now, naked and sweating on his bed, Sorrelier could still see the knowing smile that had played about those dimpled cheeks as the child approached him, dark promise in its eyes.

  It had spoken, he remembered, licking his lips. Just once.

  "Taste," it had said.

  And then, with one chubby, soft-knuckled hand, it had reached up and removed the top of its own head.

  The skull-cap came off as smoothly as the lid from a tureen. There was nothing
beneath; no skin, skull, or even brain. The child's head was an empty bowl, edged in silver filigree and set with a bed of padded satin, upon which lay the most exquisite array of candies and sweetmeats that Sorrelier had ever seen. The sight was mouth-watering.

  He had been reaching out for a particularly succulent morsel when that cursed alarm had dragged him back into hated wakefulness.

  The shivering was getting worse. He had woken too early - he needed more sleep, more time to dream. But the alarm meant he would have to do without either.

  "Lise? I need the emerald. Quickly."

  He reached out, and a moment later the jewel was in his hand, cool and smooth. It was as big as the end of his thumb, and easy to hold. Without opening his eyes Sorrelier pressed the end of the emerald to the inside of his left wrist. He felt its coldness there, then the brush of the needle, too fine and brief to be called pain.

  Sudden, icy calm filled him, along with a crisp alertness. "Well," he breathed. "That, as they say, certainly hit the spot."

  He opened his eyes and handed the jewel back to Lise, making sure the needle had slipped back into its chemical reservoir before he did so. The drug it delivered was one of his own concoction, a delicate balance of myelic enhancers and synthetic neurochemicals that had taken years to perfect. Every dose, tiny as it was, took days of intense labour to harvest. It was far, far too expensive to waste on a sylph, even one so exquisite as Lise.

  Sorrelier got up from the bed and smiled at her. "Thank you, my dear. And now, I believe, some haste is required. It would appear the lady is eager to begin."

  Tarsus was an unlovely world. Seen from orbit, it was a mottled patchwork of lumpy whites and fibrous greens, as though an apple had been left to shrivel and rot and grow fur. There were few clouds, and those that existed did more to throw the grimness of the planet's surface into sharp relief than to conceal it. In other circumstances, Sorrelier wouldn't have set foot on the place.

  Unfortunately for him, he hadn't been given the choice. The assassin wouldn't meet him anywhere else.

  The rendezvous point had been agreed days before, during an exchange of highly encrypted data transmissions. Sorrelier's ship, the Aureus, had set down exactly where and when the assassin had suggested, every one of her instructions carried out to the letter. Sorrelier didn't like following someone else's path so closely, especially when it led to a rancid sphere like Tarsus. But the situation was far too critical to take further risks.

  And so, for the past six hours, the Aureus had hunched on its slender landing claws, on a landmass so cold that the cliffs and mountains covering it were more ice than rock. In fact, Tarsus had no exposed ground at all, and its atmosphere would not have supported oxygen if its cold oceans had not been home to continent-sized mats of stinking algae.

  It had taken Sorrelier about eight minutes to tire of watching snow whip past the viewports, and the assassin was not due to arrive until dusk. There had been time, or so he had thought, for a dream or two.

  It was irksome for him to admit now how wrong he had been.

  Fully dressed, with Lise at his heel, he strode on to the circular command deck. "Rimail. Is she down?"

  "Almost, sire." Captain Rimail pointed out through the front viewports, to where a splinter of dark metal was dropping through the thin snow. "She made three fast orbits before hitting the planet's atmosphere, and a low pass that only failed to count as a strafing run because she didn't fire on us. She's a cautious creature, it would seem."

  "Indeed." The splinter was jetting fire, spitting a column of flame downwards. Smoke and steam billowed, whipped by the dry wind.

  Sorrelier touched a control, and a detailed hologram of the assassin's vessel unfolded in the air in front of him, weaving itself from threads of green light. The image was generated in real time. Sorrelier saw its thruster arrays turn slightly to resist the gale, the antimat turrets moving in response.

  Every one of the ship's weapons was aimed right at him.

  Sorrelier would have expected nothing less, especially since all those on his ship were aimed right back. "Odd looking beast," he muttered. "What do you think, Rimail? Iconoclast design?"

  "Maybe it was once." Rimail turned from the pilot's helm to face him. "There's something of a daggership about the pressure cabin and the main drive. But those weapons? And the nacelle clusters... If you ask me, sire, she's stripped that vessel to the keel and rebuilt it by hand."

  Sorrelier nodded. Rimail was a fine shipman, on his way to the seventh level of observance. He could be irreverent at times, but Sorrelier hadn't risen to his own level by ignoring the worth of a good second-in-command. He valued the man's opinion. "And if this little standoff turns ugly?"

  "Let's just say I'd rather it didn't."

  The assassin's ship dropped a single landing spine, and settled in a cloud of superheated steam. Sorrelier heard a faint chiming, and saw that his own ship's data signals warned of an incoming cypher. "Well," he said quietly, "keep a close eye on those turrets, Rimail, just in case."

  He took out his comm-linker. Words were scrolling across its tiny screen, decoding a cypher-message. Sorrelier watched it make a couple of cycles, and then sighed.

  "Lise, it looks like we'll need our furs."

  The wind was cold and horribly dry. The snow in the air was coming down from the ice-cliffs, not from any scrap of cloud cover. Sorrelier crunched his way towards the assassin's ship under a piercingly blue sky.

  The woman was already waiting for him, standing halfway between the two vessels. It was symbolically neutral territory, Sorrelier reflected, and far enough away from her ship for the antimat guns to cover without any blind spots. He looked up from under the fur-lined hood of his coat, and saw several of them tracking him as he walked.

  There was an honorific these people used, he remembered, a remnant of their troubled past. "Het Nemesine," he smiled, stopping in front of the woman. "Good to finally meet you."

  Her head bobbed slightly in a bow. "Likewise."

  Sorrelier had known, from prior research, roughly what she would look like. He was still surprised, though.

  She seemed so young.

  Nemesine was small, a full head shorter than either Sorrelier or Lise, and her features were smooth, unlined. Almost childlike. For a moment the dream fluttered behind his eyes, but he forced it away.

  She blinked at him, with huge dark eyes beneath a whipping mane of jet-black hair. What he could see of her skin was sand-brown, a heavy breath mask covering her nose and mouth, twin pipes curling down from it to the support systems of her battle armour.

  Still very much an Iconoclast, thought Sorrelier. No matter what name she takes.

  Nemesine glanced questioningly at Lise. Sorrelier shook his head. "Don't concern yourself. Lise is the epitome of discretion."

  "I'm sure she is. Tell her to back off anyway."

  Sorrelier hesitated for a second, and then turned to Lise. "Do as she says," he told her gently. "Just a few metres."

  Lise tilted her head slightly, and only when Sorrelier repeated the order did she start to move away. Leaving his side in such a situation went against all her instincts. Watching the sylph trudging carefully backwards through the snow, Sorrelier was struck with an odd reciprocal feeling, a sudden glimpse of how empty life would be without Lise.

  It was not, he decided there and then, something he ever wanted to experience.

  He returned his attention to the assassin. "Het Nemesine, it's cold out here, and there are far more weapons trained upon me than I am used to. May we proceed, or is Lise still too close for your comfort?"

  The woman shot him a glance. "Surely you can do without your pet for a few minutes, sire? But you're right. It is cold." She folded her arms. "What's the job?"

  "A live capture."

  "Tiresome."

  "But important."

  She shrugged, not easy in battle armour. "You're paying. Who's the target?"

  "Durham Red."

  There was a period of s
ilence, other than the thin hiss of the wind, and the dry, powdery snow that rattled against Nemesine's armour. Finally, she responded. "If you were just joking, you'd not have come this far. So when did you first develop this psychosis?"

  "Trust me, Het, I'm quite serious, and mostly sane. I simply want you to hunt down and capture Saint Scarlet of Durham."

  "Simply. Of course." She made a clucking sound. "It's all so simple, I wonder why I haven't done it before."

  "If anyone in the Accord can do it, it's you."

  "I'm flattered, Sorrelier. Though somewhat confused." She tugged the breath-mask away, dragging in a long breath of cold Tarsus air. Sorrelier observed with some interest the long, puckered scar that the mask had concealed, running along the left side of her jaw. He'd been previously unaware of it.

  "It may have escaped your notice," she was saying, "but there's already a considerable bounty on Durham Red. At last count, almost ten times what you're offering me. That's quite an incentive - I hear she's got at least five hundred professional bounty hunters on her trail at any one time. What have I got that they haven't?"