The Unquiet Grave Page 18

  She looked up at Othniel in time to see one of the forward batteries spit out a stream of antimat fire. Even through the thin atmosphere of Lavannos she heard it coming down, a dry ripping sound, like someone tearing old cloth.

  The energy bolts struck the ground, right over the rim of the Eye. Instantly an area half a kilometre wide bulged upwards, flashed into fire, and blasted up and out in a vast fountain of pulverised rock. Under the awesome power of the shot the body of Gaius and every other unfortunate soul in the chamber would have vaporised in an instant of time too small to measure.

  Raw energy was blowtorching out of the ground. Most of the debris cloud was still in the air. "Resquiat in pace," Antonia murmured.

  A secondary explosion flared upwards, smaller but still awesomely violent. The wheel room, Antonia guessed, connected to the cavern by the drain tunnel. The pressure build-up must have taken it apart. As she watched, a great section of the rim of the Eye fractured away, a thousand tonnes of noisome black Lavannos stone carving off and sliding in a cloud of smoke and fragments down into the crater.

  Antonia could imagine how much Erastus had enjoyed that. In a few minutes she'd let him have some more fun.

  She headed back to the monastery to join the others. Ketta was at the gate, waiting for her. "That was good shooting."

  "Wasn't it?"

  "Admiral, some of the attendants tried to leave the monastery. They had to be dissuaded."

  Antonia shrugged under her armour. "Pay them no heed, major. They are obviously tainted and cannot be allowed to leave this place. Besides, some of them might be monks in disguise. We can't take the risk."

  "Of course. Shall I bring the landing craft in?"

  Antonia's dropship was too big to set down anywhere but the landing field. Her assault against the Church of the Arch had begun from the air, with her and the shocktroopers entering the courtyard in grav-chutes. "I think it is time for that, yes. Tell the pilot to engage the landing spine on the way in so we can get the prisoners up the cargo ramp."

  She went back into the courtyard. The prisoners, three still chained to their frames and the abbot cuffed in Iconoclast restraints, had been lined up against the west wall. The abbot's hands were together as if in prayer, but not of his own choice. The restraints had a third ring that went around the neck, and the wrist-cuffs were held a certain distance away from it on a solid bar.

  The shocktroopers were in formation opposite the prisoners, weapons raised and ready. "At ease," Antonia told them. "Get ready to move the captives onto the landing craft."

  The abbot, she noted, had woken up. She wandered over to him. "Hello," she said flatly. "I'm going to hurt you."

  "You might think that," he replied. "But something's going to happen."

  He seemed perfectly calm, quite happy in fact. Antonia had seen defiance before, but this was something else. This was conviction.

  "What do you think will happen, abbot?"

  "Well," he said. "If an insect scratches you, you brush it away, don't you? You might even swat it down..."

  As he spoke, the ground moved.

  It was slight; less than the vibration Antonia had felt on Othniel's bridge, but it went on for longer. At first she thought it might be a seismic quake, some shifting of the ground caused by the cavern's demolition. But it was more than that. Some vast object, deep beneath her feet, was moving past her.

  "Oh crap," said Durham Red.

  Antonia grabbed the abbot by the shoulders. She was suddenly very afraid. "What have you done?" she gasped.

  He grinned. "Wait."

  And horror was born from the ground.

  There was no other way to describe it. It flooded up around her, through her, a titan wave of raw mental anguish. It hammered her down, and she tumbled to her knees, clutching her head as though the pressure inside would blast her apart. She was screaming, but she couldn't hear herself, because something else was screaming too.

  A scream that was tearing her mind apart.

  Dimly, she could hear that everyone else was howling too. She lifted her head, the effort almost stopping her heart in her chest, and saw shocktroopers rolling on the tiles with their heads in their hands, Durham Red shrieking and Ketta curled in a foetal position and slamming her head repeatedly against a wall. Only the abbot had his mouth closed, and he was standing where he had been chained, his eyes rolled back in his head, face twisted in a fierce, insane joy.

  It was all she could bear to see. The walls were rippling around her, the very air shaking. The scream was still ripping up around her, and it was getting worse. It was the deafening shriek of a million babes in arms, thrust into searing fires. It was the howl of a billion men as their brains were torn from their heads. It was the death scream, the birth scream, terror, pain, loss and mourning. It was unbearable.

  It was gone.

  As suddenly as it had begun, the scream was over. Antonia collapsed, as if a puppet with cut strings. She couldn't stop shaking.

  Her throat was a column of pain. She'd been screaming so loudly that she'd torn it inside.

  She panted, trying to get her breath back, to spit the taste of blood from her mouth. Some of the shocktroopers were still screaming, and the sound beat at her ears. She got to one knee, then hauled herself upright.

  "What did you do?" she hissed.

  The abbot had his head down, but he was glaring at her under his brows. His mouth was stretched in a wide, vulpine grin. There was blood oozing from between his teeth. "He wasn't even aiming at us," he laughed. "All we got was the edges of it. Don't you see, he's still not awake yet!"

  She slapped him across the face, hard, but it didn't stop him laughing. Then she remembered what he had said before.

  You might even swat it down...

  She ran across the courtyard, and began searching the sky. When she saw Othniel she almost let out another scream of her own.

  The flagship was tilting over.

  Antonia pulled the comm-linker from her belt and flipped it on. "Sub-captain!"

  The image on the screen was wavering, shot through with static. She heard what sounded like a riot in the background - instead of battle-hymns, the bridge echoed to a chorus of shrieks.

  "Erastus! Sub-captain, come in!"

  At that, he fell into view. He had his back to her, and he sounded as though he was sobbing. "I heard Him!" he howled.

  "Iconoclast, pull yourself together!"

  "I heard Him!" Erastus span around to face the pickup. His face was a mask of blood, gouts of it pouring down his cheeks like the tracks of vast tears. "I don't need to see! I can hear!"

  The man had torn out his own eyes.

  Antonia hurled the linker away, so hard that it hit the wall and shattered. Above her, Othniel was still tilting. Lights flickered over its hull, but these were not the staccato flares of manoeuvring thrusters. Those spots of brightness were centred on the weapons emplacements.

  The hunger-guns were blowing themselves up.

  She could hear them past the shrieks of the troopers and her own hoarse breathing; distant thumps, as the sentient weapons tore themselves apart. The daggership shoals were dissipating, ships spiralling out of control. She heard a lash of engines as one snapped past the monastery and into a nearby crater, followed by an explosion that sent fragments of metal and black glass whipping into the air.

  Some of the daggerships were attacking Othniel. Antonia saw one, its drives flaring at maximum thrust, dart straight towards the killship's flank. It hit the weakened hull plating, where the dampers were.

  The entire deck exploded.

  The hull vomited a horizontal sheet of fire and debris, flames blasting out port and starboard, from prow to stern. It cut the ship in half. Just as the noise of that awful detonation reached Antonia, the decks above and below the dampers exploded too. And then the ones above and below those.

  Every deck exploded in sequence, up and down, the entire ship consumed by a series of shattering blasts that filled the sky with metal.
For a second she saw the framework of the dreadnought keep its shape, but it was nothing more than a blazing skeleton that broke apart a moment later, shedding vast plates of metal and ceramic, daggership hulls, corpses. Othniel came down like lightning falling from heaven, like a comet, a melting storm of steel and fire that plummeted down into the centre of the Eye of God and was gone.

  Antonia slumped back against the wall. She could still hear daggerships thundering overhead, colliding in mid-air, crashing down into craters.

  One of the shocktroopers wouldn't stop screaming.

  Durham Red was twisting in her frame. It looked like she was having convulsions. Matteus Godolkin was sagging against his cuffs, the mutant Judas Harrow was trying to shake the mental scream from his head. Ketta was still curled in the corner, alive or dead, Antonia couldn't tell. Some of the shocktroopers were lying still in crumpled, ungainly heaps, some were up and trying to help their fallen colleagues. It was chaos.

  There was the sound of a fusion engine, drawing closer; the landing craft. Antonia sagged in a kind of relief, and then heard a sudden report; a metallic shearing noise.

  Saint Scarlet had snapped her frame in half.

  Antonia dropped her hand to her pistol, but it was gone. She saw, as if in slow motion, the Blasphemy break free of one leg-cuff, the lower beam of the frame already broken, her hands still bound to a long T-shape that extended partway down her back. She was running towards Antonia, ignoring the fractured metal bar that was still cuffed to one ankle.

  Above her, the landing craft slid sideways through the air and crashed into the roof of the monastery.

  It was obviously out of control, the landing spine still raised, the wings part-extended. The sound of the drives had risen to a deafening whine, and Antonia felt the downdraft rip at her as the vessel hammered sideways into the church. Hugely armoured, it took off the entire upper storey without trying.

  It was coming down right on top of Antonia.

  There was nothing she could do, nowhere to run. The great slab-flat side of the craft was tilting down at her, bringing down a sea of masonry. The wall below it angled out, breaking up as it did so, falling in a storm of bricks and pipe work and white stone cladding down into the courtyard.

  Durham Red hit her at a full run.

  She didn't even try to move. They were both going to be pulped by the landing craft in moments - at least like this, she would take the Blasphemy with her.

  The vampire hit her hard, bowling her over, swiping her sideways with the metal bar still chained to her arms. The impact was amazing, the pain sudden and incredible. She felt her left arm break, armour or no armour, and then she was rolling across the courtyard tiles.

  Under the landing craft.

  Its shadow covered her, enveloped her. The noise of the drives was absolutely deafening.

  Then the craft, the wall, the upper floor of the monastery and all it contained, came down on top of her.

  And everything went dark.

  14. GOING UNDERGROUND

  Not for the first time that day, Durham Red awoke in quite a lot of pain.

  It took her a few seconds to work out where she was, and how she'd managed to get there. It was dark, for one thing, very dark indeed. She wasn't even quite sure which way was up.

  The last thing she remembered was the courtyard.

  She had been chained to the abbot's frame, stacked up like firewood and reeling from the after-effects of that awful psychic shriek. She'd seen Antonia, the Iconoclast admiral, across the courtyard and decided that her most dangerous enemy was right there. None of the other troopers had regained their wits, and even Major Ketta was out of it.

  The admiral must have been hard as rocks to have been on her feet after that.

  And then, against all hope, the metal frame had bent.

  It was only the slightest movement, but Durham Red knew from past experience that once something bends, getting it to break is only a matter of strength and time. She remembered being up on the wheel, during the Iconoclast attack, the chunk of frag-shell shrapnel that had come so close to embedding itself in her vertebrae. It was still halfway through the vertical part of the frame, poking into her back. For a time, she'd thought of it as nothing more than yet another hardship. As if she didn't have enough to put up with.

  A few good pulls, however, and that sharp little piece of metal had helped her snap the whole frame to pieces.

  The bar above her shoulders was still intact, but the chain around her left ankle had failed at the same time as the lower bar sheared into two unequal parts. Suddenly, she could run. She had begun barrelling across the courtyard, hoping to take Antonia out first, then somehow get hold of a weapon and start blasting.

  Okay, she thought, it wasn't much of a plan. But it was better than waiting around to be loaded onto an Iconoclast landing craft.

  Red shifted in the dark and groaned. Oh God, the landing craft. It must have taken some of the same psionic pounding she had. It had come down right on top of her.

  Why was she suddenly back at the wrong side of the courtyard? She couldn't remember. That was her trouble, she did things without thinking, sometimes. Her reactions tended to be faster than she was.

  Abruptly, there was light. Red squinted against the glare, and turned her head away. All she could see around her was rubble.

  Someone next to her coughed.

  She looked back, past the source of the light. She wasn't alone.

  Admiral Huldah Antonia was right next to her.

  "Well," Red muttered, not long afterwards. "Looks like we're both pretty much snecked."

  From what she could gather, she and Antonia had been under the monastery wall together when the landing craft had come down on top of them. The courtyard had collapsed under the impact. Half the monastery was lying on top of them.

  The space they were in was actually quite large: above them was a hundred tonnes of assorted rubble, below and to the sides a mixture of courtyard tiles, masonry and black Lavannos stone. There had been a void under the tiles, far enough underground to have supported the courtyard for decades, but unable to withstand the massive force of the landing craft coming down on it. Red wondered if it would have given way as soon as the ship had put its landing spine down, sending them all into the pit.

  "How far down do you think we are?"

  Antonia shifted painfully, as much as she could. "Halfway to hell," she replied.

  The Iconoclast was trapped, and in far worse shape than Red. Great chunks of stonework lay across one arm and one leg, pinning her down to the floor. The leg didn't look to be in too bad shape - the foot was still moving at the end of it - but the woman's arm was definitely broken.

  Red had done that. The rubble was just adding to her woes.

  Durham Red, for her own part, was able to get up and walk around, in the space she had. But the rest of the frame was still on her, the wide bar above her shoulders, forcing her head forward, the piece of lower bar dangling off her right leg.

  She tried to roll her head around. Her neck was stiff as a board. "I feel like James Dean."

  Antonia didn't venture what she felt like. A pancake, probably. Red began looking around for a suitably sturdy piece of masonry. She found a slab of marble that looked like it weighed about half a tonne, and began edging sideways towards it.

  "What are you doing?"

  Red glanced over at Antonia. "Gonna try and bust this frame." She nodded at the flashlight in the Iconoclast's armour. "How long's that going to last?"

  "Weeks."

  "Cool." She jammed the end of the frame into a gap under the marble, and heaved down. There was a crunch of stone and the gap gave way, pitching her over backwards. "Ow! Sneck!"

  She got up, and tried again, making sure she was more solidly wedged this time. The metal bent fractionally behind her. "Oh yeah..."

  Antonia was watching her intently. It was staring to get on her nerves. Eventually she rounded on the woman. "What the hell are you staring at?"
/>   "At you."

  "Well don't."

  "Forgive me, Blasphemy. But here I am, trapped alone with the creature I have had nightmares about since I was a small child, the ultimate enemy of humankind. Can you blame my fascination?"

  Red sagged against the frame. She'd used all her strength for the moment, and pulling down on the thing didn't seem to be having much more effect. She'd try pushing in a minute, when she had her breath back. "Look, admiral, I'm not anyone's ultimate enemy, okay? I just took a wrong turn."

  "Shall I be more clear?" the woman scowled. "To the human race, which I am sworn to protect using any means necessary, you are a danger of unimaginable proportions. Don't you see, you yourself are completely unimportant! You are just a mutant, a woman out of time. But what you represent, that's where the danger lies. Saint Scarlet is a far more potent force than Durham Red can ever be." She twisted under the slabs, obviously in some pain. "That's why you must be destroyed, publicly humiliated. The Tenebrae have to be disabused of the notion that you are their Messiah."

  "I've already told them that."

  "And they didn't believe you," Antonia replied quickly. "They retreated back into the shadows for a time, but they will return, with your name on their lips as they slaughter billions. Durham Red, you were on Pyre. You have seen what they are capable of."

  "Yeah, and I was on Wodan too! Guess what, you bastards are both as bad as each other!" She gave the bar an angry shake. "No, you know what? You Iconoclasts are worse! You don't see them stealing every scrap of food from mutant planets, letting whole populations starve!"

  "Those are tithe worlds," Antonia snarled. "They were permitted to settle there on condition they redeploy ten per cent of their planetary output for the support of poorer worlds. That's what 'tithe' means - a tenth."