The Encoded Heart Read online

Minutes later Judas Harrow was up a tree, waiting for the Omegas to arrive.

  He could see quite well in the darkness, thanks to the sense-enhancers. Everything he saw was green, but in this environment that wasn't much different from daylight hours. And although a tree was a less than perfect place for an ambush - there simply hadn't been time to prepare anything better - it made a good enough sniper position. It also gave Harrow the chance to see the creatures whose death-cries had robbed him of so much sleep.

  Before this, their shapes and actions had been confined to his imagination, but perched at a junction of branch and trunk high above all the foliage, he could see that his mental images of the conflict had been sadly lacking.

  The forest was a battleground. Everywhere Harrow turned the lenses of the sense-enhancers, he saw life. And death, too.

  Scuttling things that looked like animated tangles of bone and thorny vine darted amongst the undergrowth, leaping with eerie shrieks to tear at the necks of fat, many-eyed leaf eaters. Winged creatures whined through the air between the towering boles, some longer than Harrow was tall, all bearing lethal scythes along the leading edges of their wings. Harrow watched them swoop, emitting piping whistles, to slice flesh from the loping, stilt-mounted spheroids that formed their ground-based prey. Occasionally a limb or head would be struck from its owner so violently that it would spin, gushing, into the air. Each time it happened, another flier retrieved the morsel before it touched the leaf-strewn ground.

  Teeth sank into flesh, claws ripped through bone, a ceaseless dance of bloody predation. By day, Harrow thought to himself, the forests of Ashkelon were simply an inconvenience. By night, they were a killing ground.

  He found himself pressing his back firmly against the tree trunk, and keeping a very tight grip on the carbine. The Omegas, it seemed, were not the only hunters he and Godolkin should have been wary of.

  The discovery of surviving Omega warriors on this planet had horrified Judas Harrow. He had hoped that the enhanced Iconoclasts would have been destroyed along with their creator, and the entire Omega Solution shelved as a ghastly mistake. But somehow, before he had been taken by the Ordo Hereticus, Lord Tactician Saulus had freed the first batch of his unholy children.

  The Omegas were mad, there was no doubt of that. The one Harrow had fought had been clearly deranged, and little wonder - the manner of their creation had been unimaginably traumatic.

  Driven by his hatred of all mutants, Durham Red in particular, Saulus had ordered tens of thousands of Iconoclast shocktroopers to be set at each other's throats, forcing them to fight each other to the death. Only the handful of survivors on each of his battlefield planets were deemed worthy of the Omega upgrades, and then subjected to the most agonising surgeries in order to increase their effectiveness.

  Designed with the massively increased speed and strength of a special agent like Ketta, yet to be as numerous as shocktroopers, the Omega warriors had bones that were more metal than living tissue, plus toxic blood chemistry and acidic bile. Their senses were enhanced even beyond the superhuman levels displayed by Godolkin. They were tireless, fearless, unstoppable.

  They had also, somewhere along the line, developed serious psychoses. Had the warrior Harrow battled been sane, there was no way he could have survived. Godolkin would have arrived to find the Omega butchering his corpse.

  How much that would have displeased him, Harrow couldn't say.

  The human was waiting ten metres away, in another tree. The plants were vast, their lower limbs as thick as a man's torso, the places where they joined the trunk wide enough to rest on quite comfortably. Harrow sat with his legs dangling and his rucksack hooked over one shoulder, surveying the illuminated world below him along the barrel of his carbine.

  And he was still in that same position a few minutes later, when the killing stopped.

  Harrow saw it happen, tinted green through the enhancers; saw every creature down there pause in their butchery, raise themselves in their myriad ways as if to sniff the air, then leap away. There were a few seconds noise as their exit rustled the undergrowth, then silence. Even the flying things tilted and merged among the trees.

  A moment later, one of the Omegas walked right underneath him.

  Harrow's breath caught in his throat and he froze. The enhanced Iconoclast was pacing silently past the base of the tree, weapon held at high port, looking left and right as he moved. He wore no enhancers, but Harrow had no doubt that the Omega could see as well, if not better, than he could. The warrior moved easily, as though in daylight.

  He was bare-chested, his pallid torso crossed only by a light battle harness. Harrow pulled the carbine tight against his shoulder, sighting along the barrel, knowing that a single plasma bolt at this range would be enough to blast that corpse-white torso clean open. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  Just then, at the edge of his vision, another pale figure strode into view.

  Harrow released the trigger, just a fraction. With two Omegas in the picture he would have to co-ordinate with Godolkin, taking the warriors down simultaneously. If there were a gap between one shot and the next, the surviving Omega would have shot him full of staking pins before he could even take his second aim. Instead, he glanced over at Godolkin, tilting his head questioningly.

  The human glared at him, indicating which of the Omegas he was aiming for and then holding up four fingers. Harrow started to count down from four in his head, bracing himself for the recoil, and then a third warrior appeared from the undergrowth, signalling to the others in quick, practised battlesign.

  Harrow cursed mentally. Godolkin was holding his arm up, his hand making the battlesign gesture for "hold fire."

  Then another sign. Harrow squinted, trying to make it out. Godolkin had only just started teaching him the silent language - another Iconoclast secret he was loathe to pass on to a former enemy - but it looked an awful lot like the signal for "jump".

  Harrow made a sign of his own: signal lost, repeat communication.

  In response, Godolkin simply held up something he had taken from his belt. A remote detonator.

  Harrow jumped.

  He tumbled, a reflexive yell escaping his lips, through the air and into the undergrowth below. The Omegas were brutally quick - a stream of staking pins followed him down - but as Harrow struck the ground there was a deafening whiplash of sound behind him, and the air filled with flying wood.

  The tree had exploded, blasting itself to splinters.

  Harrow had come down hard, but the greenery of the forest floor had broken his fall enough to let him roll and avoid injury. He stayed down, though, as the tree blew itself to ruin, hearing the whip and snarl of plank-sized fragments shredding the leaves and vines just above his head.

  He kept his face to the dirt for several seconds, until the undergrowth stopped shaking, then he burst upwards with the carbine ready.

  There was an Omega in front of him, still standing, but the tree had caught him. The man was impaled by dozens of splinters. Most were small, finger-sized or less. But the ones that took him through the heart and the throat were more like spears.

  Whatever had opened his belly must have been even bigger than that.

  As Harrow watched, the man toppled messily, landing in a heap amidst his own guts. Another lay nearby, head ripped off by a blade of wood. Harrow couldn't see the third warrior at first, but after a few moments the man stumbled into view, his skin so torn by splinters he was practically flayed. He stumbled a few paces, then fell, moaning.

  Godolkin stalked out of the greenery to where the fallen warrior lay, and silenced him with a single bolt from his holy weapon. "Resquiat in pace," he muttered.

  "Human!" Harrow's ears were still ringing from the blast. "What the hell did you just do?"

  "There was ten grams of detonex at the base of your tree. I set it off."

  "While I was there?"

  The man gave a shrug. "What better way to draw the Omegas close?"

  "So you used
me as bait."

  "Not for the first time, mutant, nor the last. It's a role to which you are uniquely suited." He paused and sniffed the air. "More," he snapped.

  "How many?" Harrow said.

  "Enough. Start running."

  "Any idea where to?"

  "No," Godolkin replied. "But follow me anyway." And he leapt away.

  Before Harrow knew what he was doing he was crashing through the greenery. There was no time to cut his way through the sea of plant life in his way, not if he wanted to keep Godolkin in view. All he could do was follow the man's path as accurately as he could, running over what had already been trampled and jumping the rest.

  In daylight, it would have been a nightmarish journey. In pitch blackness, his vision an artificial jigsaw of blurring green forms, it was a hellish flight. Harrow doubted he would have gotten ten metres if the plant life hadn't been starting to thin out.

  He was heading downhill. Maybe there was water ahead, a river or suchlike, the soil beneath his hammering boots giving way to rock. But that wasn't what his nose told him. "Godolkin," he panted. "Something's burning."

  As he spoke, the Iconoclast stopped dead in his tracks, and swung around. The holy weapon came up and Harrow only just managed to leap aside as a stream of cleansing fire erupted past him.

  The forest became bright, lit like day by a vast wall of flame. Harrow heard the enhancers whine in protest, and his vision darkened to compensate. A hundred metres behind him, infernos raged between the trees, layered firestorms that sent twisting columns of flame whirling up into the canopy.

  "It is now," Godolkin said flatly.

  Harrow watched him turn, and then lope away. Back in the forest trees were cracking and splitting in the heat, vines were shrinking away, creatures were running and howling in terror. Some of the trees had been home to nests of flying, scythe-winged predators. Harrow saw then swooping away, panicked, several catching fire even as they flew.

  Below them, three figures burst through the flames, running too fast to burn.

  Harrow cursed roundly, brought the carbine up and unleashed a hail of plasma at the pursuing Omegas. Two ducked easily away, swaying around and under the bolts, but one seemed confused by the fires. Plasma struck him in the shoulder and blew his arm clean off, spinning him into the undergrowth. The other two paused, looking back at their stricken companion. It was all the encouragement Harrow needed. He turned tail and raced away into the trees.

  Staking pins sliced past him, but not closely. Harrow leaped over a nest of thorny vines, battering through some hanging leaves, and then pounded down the slope. The ground was clearing rapidly, and even though he could no longer see Godolkin he was able to increase his pace until he was running flat out. There was no way he could outrun the Omegas, but a respite of even a few metres might have been enough to find another firing position. It was no certainty, he knew all too well, but right then all he could trust was luck.

  Which, a few paces later, ran out entirely.

  Before he knew it, he was in the open. The trees had simply stopped, vanished, even more suddenly than they had around the ruins. Harrow skated to a halt, but it was too late. He was already exposed, and there was another warrior heading right for him. He had just the vaguest glimpse of a slender female form wrought from green light before it struck him.

  The blow was powerful. Harrow flipped into the air and fell with enough force to knock the breath right out of him. His carbine went one way, the enhancers another. Only his backpack stayed put, and that just served to unbalance him even further. He rolled messily to a halt, ash and burned leaves in his mouth.

  There was some light in the clearing. An edge of watery moon peeked over the forest canopy, just enough for Harrow to see his carbine spinning out of reach. The female warrior ran over to it, snatched it up off the ground and pointed it at his face.

  He saw her grin, a flash of white teeth in the scant moonlight, and then she was turning away.

  "Stay on the ground where you belong, mutant," she said. "You'll live longer."

  Harrow knew that voice. "Ketta?"

  "Oh do be quiet." She had the carbine in her left hand, a cut-down bolter in her right. Harrow's eyes were adjusting quickly, now that he was free of the enhancers. In the forest he would have been sightless, but although there wasn't much light here there was at least enough to let him focus properly.

  He could see the treeline, stretching away into the night, a ragged curve of burned and broken trunks. The ground beneath him was scorched too, as though he were lying in a blast crater. For a second the awful thought hit him that he might be right back where he started, in the circle of destruction left by Hunter's flayer missile, but then the truth hit him: he had found the source of the power spikes.

  Whatever had been releasing all that energy into the forest had not done so carefully. It had scorched out a disc of ashes he could have landed Hunter in.

  It was a revelation, but one he had no time to dwell on. The Omegas were leaping from the trees, firing as they did so. One of them, a female, jumped right into a stream of plasma bolts unleashed by Ketta and exploded, the energy superheating her innards and blasting her open from the inside. The other was faster, and ducked the staking pins that came his way. He was on Ketta in an instant, backhanding her aside.

  He was big and powerfully muscled. Round-lensed goggles covered his eyes, held in place with a strap around his shaven head, and he wore a heavy battle harness over his pallid, naked chest.

  For all his size, though, he was terrifyingly fast. Ketta had gone over hard after the blow, but she had leaped to her feet more quickly than Harrow might have believed. The Omega matched her, though, sweeping her legs from under her in one kick and catching her viciously in the head with another.

  "Give it up, renegade," he snarled. "I'll make this swift."

  Ketta scampered upright. She'd lost the guns. "I was about to offer you the same deal, Hermas."

  "Don't be so quick to dismiss it, woman. Believe me, I've spent many a dream stripping the veins out of you."

  "You've dreamed of me? How sweet! No wonder your biceps are so well-developed."

  "Sacred rubies," Harrow groaned, sitting up. "Will you two hurry up and kill each other? Or are you completely in love with the sound of your own voices?"

  He heard Ketta chuckle. "Actually, Hermas, he's right. You do talk too much."

  Hermas straightened slightly, indignant. "Since when was mutant scum like that right about anything?"

  "It happens," said Ketta quietly.

  As she spoke, there was a flat, meaty impact. Harrow saw the Omega shoved forward by half a metre, his boots sending up clouds of ash as he skidded. He coughed, wetly.

  The point of a staking pin, glowing with heat, was sticking out of his breastbone.

  The warrior's head dropped forward, as if to study this wonder more closely, but then it just carried on dropping. Hermas toppled forwards and hit the ground like a felled tree. Ash came up in a cloud, settling down on him as he twitched once, then stilled.

  Ketta puffed out a breath, visibly relaxing. "You took your time, Godolkin. I can only keep an adversary talking for so long, you know. Even a wordy braggart like this one."

  "I was transfixed by your wit." The Iconoclast was striding out from the treeline, holy weapon centred on Ketta's midriff. "Harrow, are you injured?"

  "Just my pride."

  "Had you any?"

  He got up, and stumbled over to where his carbine lay. "Less now, I think. Is this the place?"

  "It would seem," the Iconoclast replied, "that we have reached our objective."

  Harrow straightened up, clutching the carbine, feeling his heart dip in his chest. He hadn't been entirely sure what he was expecting to find at the source of the power spikes, but it had never been anything so hopeless as this scorched wasteland.

  He stared around him, eyes straining in the darkness. Try as he might, he could see nothing that justified the twelve days trek through thick fo
rest, not to mention being hunted, beaten, shot at and caught on hooks. Just a wide tract of burned, ash-covered ground, broken only by a few pathetic splinters of what must have once been trees; tall shards of blackened bark reaching for the sky.

  "I don't believe it," he breathed.

  Ketta snorted. "Keep watching, mutant, and you'll see some sights." She made to move away, but a subtle shift in Godolkin's stance halted her. She doubted her ability to dodge a staking pin from so short a range.

  "Be still, agent," the Iconoclast told her quietly. "And explain."

  "We'd all be safer if I explained past the treeline."

  Godolkin shook his head. "Somehow I find the idea of escorting you back into the forest less than appealing. You can explain here."

  "By the saints!" She threw her head back in exasperation. "Are all males congenitally stupid, or just those in this galaxy? Look around you, heretic!"

  If that was an attempt to make Godolkin lose his aim, it failed. Harrow, however, gave the clearing more of his attention. His eyes were becoming more accustomed to the darkness, and now he could see that what he had taken to be fragments of tree were actually artificial. Each was a tall spire, many metres high; he could see three from where he stood, and the hint of a fourth. When he took that into account, their arrangement became clear. Each stood at the corner of a vast square, surrounding him completely.

  "Those towers," he said, mostly to himself.

  Ketta nodded angrily. "The mutant has better eyes than you, heretic. Those spires have been charging up for the past half hour, reeking of ozone, and that means only one thing. In the next few minutes, this place will become an inferno all over again!"

  "You've seen this before?"

  "Just once, but it was enough. Something happens between the towers - it caught one of the Omegas in its wash and flipped him inside out before it incinerated him."

  It didn't sound good. "Maybe we should go," said Harrow.

  "Very well." Godolkin stepped aside to let Ketta past him, motioning her with the holy weapon. As he did the forward edge of it came close to the barrel of Harrow's carbine, and there was a loud snap of voltage between the two. Harrow saw a fat blue spark connect the two weapons an instant before he felt it stinging his arm. "Ow! Sneck! What was that?"