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  DURHAM RED

  BLACK DAWN

  Durham Red: mutant, vampire, messiah. Awoken from 1,000 years in suspended animation into a galaxy where mutants are a victimized underclass. These mutants now see her as a messiah, whilst the fanatical humans hunt her down as a heretic and abomination. In this new adventure, Red is forced to seek refuge on the planet Purity - a harsh world where the citizens have outlawed all forms of technology. When the populace is slaughtered by a creature of unimaginable strength and ferocity, it falls to Red to uncover the truth!

  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

  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 © 2006 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): 978-1-84997-068-6

  ISBN(.mobi): 978-1-84997-109-6

  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

  BLACK DAWN

  PETER J EVANS

  The Legend of Durham Red

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

  Yet the 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 ghettoes 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. STORM FRONT

  It was hot on Sirion, and the sky was dark with ash. Matteus Godolkin felt the dry wind beating at him, warm and raw against his skin, like the exhaust from a distant thruster. He could smell it too, through the breath-mask, past the filters that kept the toxins and the choking powder from his lungs. It was an awful smell, the rank chemical stink of a world slain and left to rot.

  Sirion was dead. It had been dead for two hundred years, and it reeked of decay.

  Godolkin glanced down at the datapad he carried, shaking the ash from his goggles as he did so, and tipping the slate to spill more from the screen. They were motions that had become almost reflexive in the hours he had spent planetside. The cursed stuff was everywhere, filling the air like fog, coating every surface, and the hot wind cast it about continually in unending whorls of grey powder. The ash wasn't sticky, but it was fine enough to cling wherever it touched. Judas Harrow, who was walking the surface of Sirion with him, had been turned ghost-grey by the stuff in minutes, and Godolkin had no doubt that he looked much the same.

  It was fitting, in a way. Two pale, powdery wraiths, stalking through a graveyard world.

  Godolkin shook the thought away, and turned his attention back to the slate. With its screen cleared he could see that its range indicator was almost at zero. The power source he had been chasing for half a day was very close.

  He turned to Harrow, who was following a few metres behind. "It's here, mutant."

  Harrow started, plainly surprised at the sound of Godolkin's voice. There was no noise on Sirion, save that of the wind sighing through rubble, and the two men had found little to say to each other here. Dead worlds, they had discovered, were not conducive to conversation.

  The mutant trudged forwards a few more paces, picking his way through the wreckage. "Where?"

  "Within metres."

  With the goggles and mask covering most of his face, Harrow's expression was unreadable, but he gave a snort of irritation. "What you mean to say is, it's probably buried under this ruin." He stopped, and lowered his gun. It had become plain to both men hours before that there were no dangers on Sirion that weapons could protect them from, but old habits died hard. "We could be here a long time."

  Godolkin looked about, glumly. "We have tarried too long as it is. The Blasphemy may hold out some hopes of activity here, but this planet is as dead as the others. We are haunting it, mutant, nothing more."

  "True, but
the alternative is her disappointment and another week of Iconoclast mealsticks."

  "The latter I can deal with but the Blasphemy is becoming increasingly disconsolate." Godolkin found himself scanning the jumbled horizon, trying to spot the sun. It remained hidden behind the ash clouds, but what meagre light filtered through showed no signs of fading. "Perhaps it would better to make sure."

  He turned, and set off again, Harrow close behind. The airborne powder, mainly the carbonised remains of Sirion's cities, contained enough of a metallic component to confuse the datapad's direction finders, so tracking down the source of the radio signal was going to be a matter of triangulation.

  Godolkin took a reading from the slate, made a swift mental calculation and then changed direction, picking his way through a tangle of broken metal beams. Up ahead of him, half-hidden by the swirling dust, fragments of wall poked up from the grey, ashy piles of debris.

  He tracked the signal down to what had been the outskirts of a fair-sized town. Two hundred years before, when the Manticore had first appeared in Sirion's orbit, it had pounded the surface with its temporal weapons, dragging every settlement into oblivion. The scars it had left were still visible from orbit, on sense-engine feeds capable of penetrating the ash layer: hemispherical craters ringed by vast seas of pulverised rubble.

  If any of Sirion's colonists had survived the onslaught, they must have fallen victim to environmental damage within weeks. Two centuries later the ash layer had thinned enough to allow the growth of a few hardy weeds, but the air was still thin and tainted. Back when the cities had only just been ripped away, the entire planet must have been thrust into continual freezing darkness. Nothing would have survived.

  And yet, among these mountains of wreckage, something artificial was still bleating out a message to the stars.

  Godolkin pushed his way through the last of the beams, and started clambering up a shallow hill of rubble. Dust rose instantly to surround him, reducing visibility almost to nothing. "Harrow?"

  "What have you found?"

  "Your optimism does you credit," the Iconoclast growled. "I cannot even see, let alone find anything. It might be best to stay where you are."

  "You could be right." From his position at the base of the hill, Harrow must have noticed how badly Godolkin was obscured. "What will you do?"

  "I will continue." An Iconoclast First-Class, even one cursed by the bite of the arch-vampire, could function perfectly well with any one of his five senses impaired. Godolkin had fought duels blindfolded, back in basic training.

  He closed his eyes behind the goggles, letting touch and memory take over. His hands brushed the powdery debris and he trudged upwards, his strong fingers finding purchase among steel and stone. Within a few moments he crested the rise, and shook his goggles clear to find himself among the walls he had seen.

  The datapad began to emit an unbroken tone, mournful in the grey twilight. Godolkin shut it off.

  The clouds he had raised cleared a little, now that he was high enough for the wind to carry them off. The walls surrounded him, low and jagged, jutting at crazy angles from the hill's top and flanks. Godolkin could see what must have been part of a doorway, and for a second its structure confused him: there seemed to be a section of wall at the lowest point of the door, as if anyone passing through would need to step over it. It seemed an odd way to build a door, unless some kind of raised floor had once met it there.

  Then he realised. The wall was upside down.

  The force of the Manticore's blasts must have flipped this structure completely over before shattering it. Given the size of the craters, and the ferocity of the energies that had created them, the entire building could have been thrown hundreds of metres through the air before coming down roof-first.

  The thought was awful. Godolkin moved away from the inverted ruins, glad to be free of them, and began to look for something intact.

  He found it on the other side of the hill. Looking downslope he could see what looked like a small pyramid, its three mismatched sides almost obscured by rubble. "Harrow? I may have found the source."

  "Do you want me to come up?"

  "Stay where you are. You'll raise less dust." Godolkin clambered down towards the pyramid, confirming as he got closer what he had thought upon first seeing it; that the three faces were actually the congress of two walls and a roof. This structure must have been canted at a wild angle too, but it seemed far more intact than the broken walls behind him.

  After a few minutes of heaving rubble about, he found a door.

  He managed to get the upper half of it clear, and then kicked it inwards. It came easily away from its runners, sagging away from him in a cloud of ash and then toppling into the structure's interior. Godolkin drew a hand-lume from his battle-harness and crouched in front of the space he had made, pushing his goggles up and peering inside.

  There was no need to go in. The lume's yellow light showed him everything he needed to see.

  The structure must have been more accessible at some time in the past, back before it had shifted off the hill and sunk beneath the rubble. At least three people had taken shelter there. One of them, it seemed, had tried to set up a quantum-link distress beacon.

  Godolkin could only guess at what had gone on behind that door, but the beacon - now chirping plaintively from beneath the crumbling ribs of the nearest skeleton - had only been partly activated. It had never sent its quantum-inseparability signals out into the void, only a carrier signal. Enough to draw a curious starship down out of orbit, but no more.

  There was something else between the skeleton's ribs, a slender length of rust that had been sharp and serrated in its day. And whatever those scattered fingerbones had once held must have been enough to blow splintered holes through the skull of at least one of the others.

  Godolkin had seen no other corpses on Sirion. That the only three in evidence had met such desperate, terrified ends took all the strength from him.

  He stayed looking at the dusty tableau for a minute, maybe two, then silently reached in through the door and switched the beacon off, stilling Sirion's last voice. He stood up.

  The comm-linker at his side chimed faintly as he straightened. Godolkin took it from his belt and saw Durham Red's crypt-icon glowing on its face. "Blasphemy."

  "Harrow said you'd found something?"

  The Iconoclast shook his head, even though she couldn't see it. "He is wrong, mistress. There is nothing here to find."

  The rubble rings extended for kilometres around every crater, and the terrain they encompassed was wildly uneven. There had been no way that Godolkin could have landed Omega Fury anywhere near the source of the signal; he had considered himself lucky to find a suitable location within a day's march. After several flypasts he had spotted a clearing at the very rim of a debris field, and set the ship down there. He was vaguely suspicious of the place, not least because it settled very slightly under the weight of Fury's landing spine, but at least it had been reasonably level. Fury's gyros could only take so much.

  Stable though the landing zone was, it still meant a long journey back. Not quite as arduous as the trip out, because the two men knew where they were going this time, but it was still utterly dark long before they reached Omega Fury.

  Both men carried hand-lumes, but their beams didn't penetrate far in the choked air. Godolkin moved through the wreckage in a bobbing puddle of light.

  Harrow had the datapad now, and was using it to guide them back to the ship. "It shouldn't be much further," he told Godolkin eventually. "Half a kilometre, maybe. Can you see it yet?"

  "No." Godolkin took a few more paces in silence, then paused. He felt Harrow almost walk into his back.

  "What is it?"

  "Be still, mutant." The Iconoclast glanced about, cursing the breath-mask for blocking his sense of smell. He was certain something had moved out there in the darkness, but there was too much filth in the air for him to determine what. It could just have been a settling of the de
bris, of course, although there was a crawling feeling between his shoulder-blades that told him otherwise.

  He lifted the comm-linker. "Blasphemy?"

  "Godolkin? Where are you?"

  "Not far, according to Harrow. Have you been watching the sense-engines?"

  There was a slight pause. "Depends what you mean by watching..."

  Godolkin took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. "Blasphemy, I believe there is danger here. A sweep with the motion-detectors would be nothing if not a help."

  "No problem." He could hear her voice jolting, as if she was running. "Anything else?"

  Harrow leaned close to the linker's pickup. "The landing lumes, holy one. Set them to full beam - we can use them as a visual beacon."

  "On my way."

  Godolkin stayed where he was, listening hard. He felt Harrow step closer.

  "Is it me?" breathed the mutant, "Or is the wind picking up?"

  Godolkin didn't answer. As Harrow had spoken, a tiny glow had winked on ahead of them, brightening quickly until it shone among the debris piles. Omega Fury's landing lumes, pouring light out into the dust-laden air. The lumes were built to illuminate landing strips from a kilometre up, and even in Sirion's tainted air they gave off enough light to actually pick out the nearest hills.