The Encoded Heart Read online

  The future of Sorrelier's plans looked about as likely to survive as Durham Red. He could see her on the visula, hopping into a skiff and pulling the canopy down, ready to fly from the Keep to freedom.

  She couldn't know about the security locks, installed in every Magadani craft to prevent unauthorised access to the poisoned lands outside. No one would have told her that flying such a vessel away from the Keep, without express permission from the Magister himself, would cause the power plant to go critical within a few kilometres.

  If he couldn't turn her back, Durham Red would die, and all his plans would go with her. Down in flames to meet the hard ground of Magadan.

  11. ASHKELON

  The forests of Ashkelon were thick and uniformly impenetrable. During almost two weeks of travel Harrow and Godolkin had gone no more than a hundred and fifty kilometres from the landing site.

  "Landing" wasn't a word Judas Harrow would have used out of choice, but the phrases he might have preferred - "crash", perhaps, or even "impact", seemed to unsettle Godolkin. Without Durham Red around to mediate between the two men, Harrow thought it safest not to antagonise the Iconoclast any more than necessary.

  Still, the fact was that Hunter had "landed" at something close to five hundred kilometres per hour, hard enough to bounce his skull off the navigation board and black him out for an hour. To his credit, he was not the only man aboard to have been knocked senseless as the yacht came down; Godolkin had lost consciousness too, although only for a few minutes. When Harrow had regained his wits, the Iconoclast was already unlocked from his harness and attempting to bring the ship back to life.

  The landing had gone almost to plan, but not quite. Crimson Hunter had come down in the centre of the flayer's blast crater, which had saved it from being battered to pieces by tree trunks, but the manoeuvring thrusters hadn't been enough to slow it down. Later, after they had left the ship, Harrow had been able to see what had happened to it; how the yacht had belly-flopped onto the ground, bounced, then dropped again prow first, and embedded itself in the forest two hundred metres past the forward edge of the crater.

  Crimson Hunter was hanging among burned trees, prow down, its shattered drives pointing at the sky. When Harrow had awoken he had found the deck sloping under him by an angle of about forty-five degrees, and the ship's nose a metre off the ground.

  It could have been far worse. The yacht was still largely intact, most of its systems functional and the reactor undamaged. Harrow considered it unlikely that Hunter would ever leave Ashkelon under its own power, but the ship was far from dead.

  The comms system was damaged, but repairable. Miraculously, the sensorium had survived largely intact, and it was this that Godolkin had been working on when Harrow had come round. He had been trying to locate the other two ships, and to find any trace of Durham Red.

  He had failed, on both counts.

  From what the sense-engines had been able to tell them, neither Ketta's bastardised daggership nor the craft with the shadow web were in orbit. If they had landed, they must have done so some distance away, far enough for the forest to block their energy signatures. And there were no other vessels in detection range.

  While Godolkin worked on the sensors, Harrow had unstrapped himself and climbed down to the communications. He had tried sending a signal to Durham Red on every cipher he could think of, but there was no reply. Either she was not on Ashkelon, or she was not capable of answering him.

  Neither thought gave him much comfort.

  It was much later that first night when the sense-engines finally gave a sign of hope. Harrow had been sorting through the equipment lockers, setting aside any undamaged tools or apparatus they might need in the days to come, when there was a chiming from the sense-feeds. The event that caused the alarm was short-lived, and Harrow wasn't able to get back to the nav board in time to see it. Luckily, Hunter had recorded the incident.

  Out in the darkness, almost two hundred kilometres due north, the forest had come alive with power. The energy spike was so vast and so sudden that Harrow initially mistook it for an explosion. But a few minutes more at the board convinced him nothing had been blown up among the trees. Instead, a device of immense electrical potential had activated, increased its output to a peak and then shut down, all in the space of a few seconds.

  There had been nothing more. Come morning, neither man had been able to pick up any other sign of technological activity on Ashkelon. The decision to head north was not a difficult one.

  On the eleventh day, Judas Harrow rose with the sun, as he always did. He looked up to see Godolkin standing by the portable fusion heater, holy weapon at the ready. That was where he had been when Harrow had finally drifted off. The Iconoclast didn't look as though he had moved all night.

  Harrow gave him a sour look as he sat up. "One day, human, I'll see you sleep. I swear it."

  "If you're so eager, perhaps you'd like to keep watch tonight." Godolkin lowered his weapon, and surveyed Harrow's crumpled form with undisguised contempt. "Although something tells me you need the rest more than I."

  Harrow declined to answer. He never found it easy to sleep at the best of times, and curling up among the wet leaves of Ashkelon's endless forest was no way to get a restful night. He spent most of the hours of darkness lying awake, listening to creatures fighting and tearing each other among the trees. Ashkelon seemed as rich a source of fauna as it was flora, but whatever was screaming out there in the forest remained well hidden during the day. Harrow hadn't seen any creature larger than his own thumb since he had arrived.

  He began stowing the heater away, collapsing the vanes and the baffles until he was able to fold the device up in its own casing, and stash it in his backpack. "Since you stood watch, human, I'll lead the way for a while."

  "Very well." Godolkin handed him the dataslate. "Hunter recorded no more spikes during the night, nor any orbital activity."

  Harrow nodded, studying the slate's display. The slate was a flat pod of systemry the size of his hand, heavily strengthened for battlefield use. It belonged to Godolkin, Iconoclast standard issue, and had proved an essential item on the journey so far. For one thing, it contained an inertial compass, without which they could have trekked no more than a hundred metres without becoming completely lost. It also had a direct cipher-link back to Hunter's onboard computers.

  He called up the overnight recording, which was as blank as Godolkin had reported, then checked the day's route. Hunter had generated their path for them, taking into account the terrain features it had scanned on its initial orbits of Ashkelon. Harrow didn't doubt that it had saved them days.

  "We're close," he said finally. "Ten hours, maybe twelve."

  "I estimated the same," nodded the Iconoclast. "With luck and effort we could reach our destination by nightfall."

  Harrow let out a long breath. "That's good news," he replied.

  Another day hacking their way through the forest would be less than pleasant, but nothing he couldn't handle. He had survived eleven days of Iconoclast mealsticks and filtered water, roasting in the sodden heat of the daylight hours and freezing at night, all the while under Godolkin's baleful gaze. Had their destination been further away, however, Harrow wasn't entirely sure he could have made it.

  Although what the alternative might have been, he wasn't prepared to think about.

  He clipped the dataslate to his belt, took a long, curved vibrablade from his backpack and swung the pack over his shoulder. Godolkin had already done the same, his rucksack bulging with a hundred kilos of equipment and ammunition. Most of its weight was comprised of spare fuel and replacement staking pins for his holy weapon. If they ran into Ketta again, or anyone from the shadow-ship, the Iconoclast would be fully equipped for the encounter.

  He wasn't the only one. Harrow hefted the vibrablade, triggering the power for long enough to send the weapon sweeping effortlessly through an arm-thick pole of vegetation. "Bring them on," he whispered.

  Godolkin had taken
up position a few metres behind him. "Did you speak, mutant?"

  "Hmm? Oh, I said we should get on."

  "Of course you did."

  There had been three more power spikes since the first. Hunter had recorded them all, and Harrow had reviewed the data whenever he had been able. However, neither he, nor the yacht's data-engines had been able to explain what might be vomiting gouts of raw energy into the skies of Ashkelon.

  The only constant that the spikes shared was their location. Each had happened at exactly the same spot, but they varied wildly in both duration and intensity. The discharges didn't happen at regular intervals, either. Two had been within minutes of each other, the next days later. It made no sense.

  There was much about this world that made no sense. Harrow had almost given up pondering its mysteries.

  He had been cutting his way through the undergrowth for almost two hours now, and the ground ahead was beginning to slope downwards. He skirted a tangle of tree boles, used the blade to sever some of the vines blocking his path, and then paused for a moment to check the dataslate. He stuck the vibrablade into the ground while he did so, to keep his hands free. Without his finger on the trigger it was no sharper than a rough machete, and stood perfectly vertical.

  A bug landed on the back of his neck and he flattened it reflexively. None of the myriad insects he had encountered had actually tried to bite him yet - presumably his physiology was as alien and unappetising to them as theirs to him - but he didn't like to take chances. One of them might pluck up the courage.

  He frowned at the slate. A new icon was blinking there. "Godolkin? What do you make of this?"

  The Iconoclast trotted up to join him, and leaned over to study the screen. "How long ago did this appear?"

  "A minute, maybe two." The slate had its own detection equipment, adding to the more powerful sense-engines aboard Crimson Hunter. "We got close to something."

  "Hmph." Godolkin looked up, glaring out between the trees. "These readings denote a source of energy. It is of low yield, but the signature denotes a fusion core."

  "A ship?"

  The human nodded slowly. "If it was powered down, yes."

  Harrow took a deep breath. Hunter had been watching the skies ever since they had reached this world, and nothing had landed here since their arrival. Which meant they had either stumbled across Major Ketta's daggership, or the mysterious stealth-craft that had attacked them on the way in. In both cases, no one aboard would be pleased to see them.

  Unless it was Durham Red.

  "She might be there," Harrow said.

  "I'm aware of that. In addition, this vessel could provide us with a replacement for Crimson Hunter. Whether we find the Blasphemy alive or not, we will require a functioning starship."

  "Well then," Harrow replied. "I think a short detour might be in order, don't you?"

  They left their backpacks at the base of a nearby tree, along with a tracer set to remote activation - if they needed to find the packs again in a hurry, a touch of the right dataslate icon would cause the tracer to send out a signal.

  Along with the mealsticks and other survival equipment, the packs contained a sizeable selection of weapons. Harrow put the vibrablade aside and took out a short-barrelled plasma carbine, checking it was fully charged and set to burst-fire, while Godolkin unsheathed his silver blade. Harrow watched it extend from the handgrip, unfolding itself with a sibilant, metallic hiss into a sword-blade two metres long and scalpel-sharp. The third symbolic weapon of the elite vampire killer.

  He looked away. The weapon had been designed for one specific purpose: to separate Durham Red's head from her neck. "Take care how you swing that blade, human. We may have to fight in an enclosed space."

  "In which case, heed your own advice." Godolkin whirled the sword around, testing its weight with one hand, his right forearm still enclosed by the holy weapon. "Perhaps our journey ends here, Judas Harrow."

  Harrow didn't answer. He wasn't exactly sure what sort of conclusion the Iconoclast had in mind.

  The vegetation was growing thin by the time they saw the source of the power reading, the first time Harrow had seen it do so. He could feel the temperature rising as the canopy grew more sparse above him, the morning sunlight striking down in shafts. Sweat began to run under his mesh armoured jacket.

  He ignored it, watching Godolkin move on through the trees. The two men were a few metres apart, so as not to hinder each other's movements or provide too tempting a target. And while Harrow's slender frame leant itself to stealth, the hulking Iconoclast padded forward with an effortless silence. There was a deadly, predatory grace to him, the calm poise of the elite warrior.

  Harrow hoped it would be enough. There was no telling what kind of odds they might be up against. He stepped between two tree boles, over an expanse of wiry creepers, and put his foot down on something cold and hard.

  His heart jumped in his chest, and he froze. For a moment he was convinced that he had trodden on a land-mine, that in the next instant he would be blasted limb from limb, but there was no explosion.

  Matteus Godolkin appeared next to him like a ghost. "What?"

  "I'm not sure," Harrow breathed. "Something underfoot."

  There had been rocks beneath his boots - the ground here was treacherous, littered with stones, rotted wood and all manner of debris under the covering of leaves - but this was different. It was smooth and flat, a wide block that felt inflexible and hard.

  Nothing natural felt like that. This was manufactured.

  Silently, Harrow shifted some of the leaf cover away with the side of his boot, and confirmed what he had suspected. He was standing on a paving slab.

  The stone was old, the edges worn smooth by time, but there was no mistaking the artificial nature of it. Godolkin nodded his acknowledgement, and moved on, modifying his footfalls for the new terrain. Taking extra care not to make a sound, Harrow resumed his own path, his feet finding more slabs, less leaves. Before he had gone a dozen metres, he was under the open sky.

  He couldn't help glancing up. It was the first time he had seen clouds since leaving Hunter.

  Ahead of him, the thinning trees seemed to reach a line and then cease altogether. Beyond that boundary, grey stone glinted in the sunlight. Harrow could see structures there; some intact, others torn down to piles of vine-clogged rubble. Further away, tiers of rough steps rose skywards to cast a long shadow over what must once have been some kind of courtyard, and decayed stone faces gazed impassively back into the treeline.

  In the midst of this ancient ruin, dark metal gleamed.

  Harrow dropped into a crouch, easing back behind the nearest tree. Ketta's modified daggership was resting in the centre of the courtyard, some of the slabs below it scorched black by the heat of its thrusters. Others lay shattered beneath the vessel's landing spine. Ketta had come down hard too, it seemed, although she had been able to choose a more suitable landing site than Godolkin's blast crater. If her drives had been failing, the stone town must have been as welcome as a spaceport.

  There was the faintest rustle next to him. It was Godolkin. "I see we weren't the only ones to have drawn fire from that stealth-vessel."

  Harrow looked more closely, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and saw that the human was right. Molten holes were stitched along one of the daggership's winglets, and ragged tongues of metal were ripped back from a gaping wound in its flank. There was a drive nacelle missing too, but Harrow had seen that go. "What do you think?" he whispered. "Is it spaceworthy?"

  "It appears to be," Godolkin replied. "However, Ketta will have encrypted the vessel's control codes. We cannot operate it without them."

  "It's an Iconoclast ship, isn't it? Can't you override the encryption?"

  "Possibly. But it would take time."

  "If we can get Ketta out of the way, we'd have time." Harrow chewed his lip nervously. "Easier said than done, though. She's a tough one."

  "Aye." Godolkin stood up. "Still, one way or anothe
r we need to be aboard that ship. You have the data-pick with you, yes?"

  "We'll have a long walk back if I haven't." Harrow reached down to a pouch on his belt, and pulled the pick free. He handed it to Godolkin. "Lucky us."

  "Mutant humour," growled the Iconoclast. "One day you must attempt to explain it to me." He stood up, and grabbed one of the tree's lower branches. Harrow saw the muscles in his arms bunch under the battle harness, and heard the squeaking of overstressed wood. A moment later the branch splintered away from the trunk; Godolkin stepped around the tree and threw it high into the air.

  If the daggership had been on sentry mode the branch would have hit the ground as ash, but it seemed Ketta's ship had been powered down. The antimat turrets remained still, even as the branch tumbled end over end and clattered down onto the stone slabs.

  "Hmm," Godolkin murmured, and stepped out of the treeline. A second later he launched himself into the open, darting away towards the ship.

  Harrow followed him, out from the forest and into the ruins. The stone walls on either side of him felt momentarily cold, before he stepped back out in the full glare of the sun, his boots crunching on old stone as he hammered across the courtyard to the ship's landing foot. It was hard not to crouch as he ran, even though the ship's weapons stayed resolutely inert. There were a lot of guns on that thing.

  By the time he reached the foot, Godolkin was already working at it with the data-pick. Harrow stopped behind him, nosing the carbine left and right, casting nervous glances around the courtyard. These ruins were the first signs of habitation he had seen on Ashkelon, and even though they were covered in creepers and turned halfway to rubble by time, they were still impressive. People of considerable skill and imagination had once made their homes on this steaming, hellish world.

  The data-pick chirruped, and the outer lock doors slid aside. Holy weapon at the ready, blade held aloft, Godolkin ducked into the landing foot. Harrow took one last look over his shoulder, and then followed.