The Unquiet Grave Page 19

  "Screw a tenth! You take it all!"

  Antonia rolled her eyes. "Yes, Blasphemy, in a perfect universe there would be enough ships to take their tenth every standard year, but there aren't - mainly due to the actions of your Tenebrae friends. So we take everything once every ten years. If they had the wit to plan for it there wouldn't be a problem."

  "Ah, sneck it!" Fury gave Red a sudden burst of strength. She heaved, planting her boots as hard as she could and forcing herself upwards. Her legs shook with strain, the marble slab shifted warningly, and then the metal gave way.

  The upper bar exploded, fragments of it whining away and spinning off the rubble. Red found herself sprawling, her back singing with pain.

  But she was free. She dropped her arms for the first time in hours. "Oh sneck, that feels good!" She collapsed backwards, landing hard on her rump, then slumped against the nearest wall. The cuffs around her wrists and one ankle remained, but she would deal with them later. Just for a minute or two, she wanted to luxuriate in not walking around as though crucified.

  After a short time she sat up again. Antonia was still looking at her. "Face it, admiral. You hate mutants. I'm a mutant. We're never going to see straight on this."

  "I hate the Tenebrae. Not every mutant is Tenebrae, just as not every human is Iconoclast." Antonia sagged back. "You are a woman of some honour, Durham Red. I have a request."

  Red raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"

  "When you bleed me, take it all."

  "Erm, look, that 'vampire bite' thing-"

  "Is childish nonsense, I have no doubt. But everyone else must continue to believe it." Antonia closed her eyes. "Faith is a powerful weapon. There may come a time when it is the only thing humans have left."

  "Well, until that day..." Red used a piece of the metal bar to stab down between the links of the ankle-chain, shattering it. "You're not getting off so lightly, admiral."

  It took some effort to get Antonia out from under the rubble. Red probably could have shifted any one of the slabs on her own, but each one tended to be trapped under something else, forming an interlocking puzzle of weight and tension. If she levered the wrong one away, the entire roof might fall in, flattening the pair of them.

  Eventually she used some of the metal frame to heave the largest slab up a few millimetres, enabling Antonia to get her leg free. The stone across the admiral's arm was smaller and loosened slightly by her actions on the one below. Red shifted that one much more easily, although she was careful to remove the knife from Antonia's wrist sheath before she did. "Sorry, Het Admiral. It's not that I don't trust, you. I just don't trust you."

  "Do you honestly think I would be in any condition to take you on, Blasphemy?"

  "No. But I think you might try anyway."

  While Antonia attended to her injuries, Red began to explore the void. There was no way up through the roof of the cavern, that was for sure. It looked like they had fallen several metres at least, with most of the monastery filling in the gap. She wondered if anyone was left alive above ground. Whether, if there was, they had the slightest notion that Red and Antonia might have survived. "You've not got a comm-linker at all, have you?"

  Antonia was modifying part of her armour, strapping her broken arm down across her chest. "I'm afraid mine broke."

  Red started to probe some of the rubble. At one end of the cavern she had seen some shards of Lavannos stone that didn't look like they had come from the roof. "Toni? Come and check this out."

  The Iconoclast glared at her sideways as she limped closer. "What have you found?"

  She pointed to one of the shards. "If this had come from up there, it would be flat on both sides, yeah?"

  "But that's curved on both sides. Do you think there were two voids here?"

  Red nodded. "Yup. In fact, this planet's full of them. It's a sponge. We can't be too far from the one under the reliquary - if we can get there, we might be able to climb back out. Or into the drive complex."

  They began pulling at the rubble. Antonia, despite only being able to work one-handed, was surprisingly strong. Within a few minutes they found a gap. "Bingo," Red grinned. "Shine me a light on that, admiral."

  It wasn't big enough to climb through, not yet. Red had to lie on her back and kick chunks of it away. She kept half an eye on Antonia as she did, but the Iconoclast seemed to have little interest in attacking her. Maybe she was grateful not to have been bitten.

  Abruptly, the gap widened. The rubble above it shifted, making a kind of stuttering groan. Dust sifted down. "Toni, go through. Now."

  "Blasphemy-"

  "Christ, just go through!" She grabbed the Iconoclast and flung her bodily through the hole. She heard the woman yelp, tumbling away, and then she scrambled into the gap behind her. There was a drop in front of her, a metre or two, and more rubble. She twisted to come down on her shoulder, brought her legs out of the hole and as she did so the entire wall of rubble shifted down half a metre.

  Red stayed where she was for a moment or two, puffing. When she stood up, she almost fell over. The rubble wall had sheared off one of her boot heels.

  She snapped off the other one. "Toni? How are you doing there?"

  "Blasphemy, you have entombed us."

  Antonia was standing a few metres away, illuminated by the glow of her own flashlight. She pointed upwards. "This void is intact. There is no way for us to leave this space."

  "Oh ye of little faith," Red joined her. "Switch your light off."

  "Why do you-"

  "If you're going to question every single thing I ask you to do, we are going to be down here a really long snecking time! Now switch the pissing light off, okay?"

  Antonia scowled, but in a second they were standing in darkness. "Wait," Red told her.

  "There appears little else to do."

  "All right, wait and shut up."

  Red forced herself to relax, letting her pupils grow wide in the darkness. She remembered being down in the relic cavern, just before the abbot's fake wall had given way under her touch. If they were anywhere near part of the complex, there would be a-

  "Light!" hissed Antonia. "Over there!"

  The Iconoclast was right. A faint blue glow was issuing from one side of the void. "Thought so," said Durham Red, and kicked the wall hard.

  It cracked. Antonia put her light back on, and together the two women subjected the stone to a torrent of vicious kicks. It gave way inside half a minute.

  The admiral gave her a long stare. "How did you know?"

  "We're at the right level. The complex has got to be big - what I saw of it must only have been a small part. I reckon we can't go too far under the church without hitting part of it."

  "You were lucky."

  "I often am."

  The way into the complex wasn't easy. The gap Red had found was the fractured corner of some kind of under-floor duct, full of wiring and pipework. She had to squeeze into that, then crawl far enough until she found a panel that came up when she pushed it.

  It took Antonia longer, with a broken arm, but after some effort the two women were standing in a wide, blue-lit corridor. "Have you seen this part before?"

  Red scratched her head. "No, we went in the other direction. Not even sure if I could get to the ops room from here. Of course, that might not get us out; I think the reliquary got squashed."

  "Then are we any better off than we were?"

  "We will be if we can get some kind of communicator working." Red began stalking off down the corridor, towards the nearest turning. She heard Antonia limping after her. "I think this place was built about two hundred years after I went to sleep. That makes it advanced for me, but well in advance of you, too. The Bloodshed robbed you of all this."

  "So if we see a communications device, will we recognise it?"

  "I'll let you know if I see one." She stopped, and frowned. "Did you feel something?"

  Antonia opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again with an audible snap as the entire corridor
trembled around them. "That, you mean?"

  Red looked back along the corridor, just in time to see the floor erupt.

  The foam mesh exploded upwards, panels of it flying around the corridor as a mass of tendrils slammed up and into the air. In seconds they had slimed up the walls, over the ceiling, turning an entire section of corridor into a writhing, squealing forest of grey coils, as pale and wetly translucent as raw squid.

  Tentacles lashed out towards Red and Antonia, boiling up through the floor.

  Red jumped back, stamping down hard on a rope of slime that was slithering along the mesh towards her, feeling it burst sickeningly under her boot. Antonia was scrambling away from the awful mass, but her damaged leg was slowing her up. The first tendrils had already wrapped around her ankle, and were tugging her off balance. She toppled, howling.

  There was no way Red could let her be swamped like that, even if she was an Iconoclast. She launched herself back to where Antonia lay and began slashing at the tendrils with the admiral's knife. They parted easily, like strings of mucous, but there were thousands more of them whipping towards her, reaching for her head.

  Abruptly, the mass drew back. It retreated into itself sharply, like the eye of snail, dozens of individual tendrils, some as fine as wire, corkscrewing back on themselves. The centre of the mass, where the tendrils were thickest, seemed to solidify.

  Forms vomited out of it, fluid and half-made, spilling out of the mass for mere seconds before being pulled back in and re-digested. Polyps of what looked like armoured brain tissue, thick, greyish tubes, veined and gut-like. Oddly-jointed limbs, identical to the chrome implement she had seen in her nightmare. Part of an eye.

  Around them, the air rippled. Red saw it, just for a fraction of a second before a deafening shriek of raw fury blasted into her.

  She span away into the floor, clutching her skull. The scream was like nails being driven into her head, a relentless, pounding wave of pure agony. She was crushed by it, torn apart by it. She had never felt such anger, such pain. It was splitting her mind.

  And past the rage, past the pain, Durham Red felt something else. It brushed by her, like the whisker of a tiger touching her skin in the dark - the barest, most teasing glimpse of a vast and terrible awareness - and was gone.

  As suddenly as it had started, the scream faded again. Red collapsed, rolling onto her back, seeing the tendrils sliding back and away, down the gaping hole they had made in the floor.

  Antonia was curled up in a ball on the other side of the corridor.

  Red rolled up and onto her feet. Her head was gonging. "It's waking up," she gasped. "Sneck, I felt it! It's waking up."

  "It was looking at me," Antonia breathed into the wall.

  "It was looking at everything..." That awareness, just for a fraction of a second, had been horribly focussed. Red had felt it like the naked stare of a billion eyes, looking everywhere at once and at the same time looking right at her. She reached down and helped the Iconoclast to her feet. "You okay?"

  "I am. Blasphemy, we have to get away from this place. Call in the fleet and have them blast this moon to ash."

  "Great plan, Toni, except that this thing took out your killship just by snoring loudly." Red slid the knife into her belt. "I don't know about you, but I got the impression just now that it's hitting the 'stretching and scratching itself' stage. What do you think it'll be like when it wakes up completely?"

  Antonia squared her shoulder. "You are right, Blasphemy. Congratulations: you have just been downgraded to the second greatest danger to humankind."

  They moved more warily, now on edge for the slightest sign. A shiver in the air, a movement beneath the ground, anything.

  "That last time I saw it," Red told Antonia," it was in the drive chamber. It must be moving around under the surface. Maybe busting through the voids to get about."

  "That will make hunting it down difficult."

  "Maybe. Or, we could bust open the abbot's head and use him as bait."

  Antonia appeared to mull this over for a few moments. "Actually, I quite like the way you're thinking."

  "Not much use until we can get some guns, though. It'll just yell us to death. Hello, what's this?"

  The corridor ended in a large, circular chamber, heavily panelled, with a round seating area set into the centre. Five other tunnels stretched away from it, set equidistantly around the wall like the spokes of a wheel. "Grand Central," Red muttered.

  "Blasphemy, these corridors are labelled." Antonia had found a plaque set into the wall, covered in crumbling paint. She brushed the flakes away with a gloved hand, revealing letters etched into the metal. "Accommodation?"

  "I've got power and systems over here," Red replied, doing some brushing of her own.

  Antonia moved to the next plaque along. "Operations."

  "Ops? Thank sneck!" Red grinned. "That'll get us back into the monastery, when the time comes."

  "Time? Blasphemy, the time for me to be off this ghastly little moon came several hours ago!"

  "Came and went, admiral. Look, we've got to stop this bastard, right? Who knows what it'll do when it wakes up. Or who it'll fancy for breakfast." Red jerked a thumb back towards the first plaque she had uncovered. "If we can get the power up and running, we'll have the upper hand. Sensors, communications, maybe even weapons. We can call your people on the surface and get them to come down all guns blazing, cook the son of a bitch in its sleep!" She slapped her fist into her other hand. "But we've got to move fast."

  Antonia took a deep breath, then nodded. "You are right. At the cost of my eternal soul, Durham Red, I agree with you."

  "Souls," Red grinned. "Who needs 'em?"

  The power core wasn't close. When Red forced the door open, they were confronted with another maglev track. "Nuts," she snarled.

  She turned to the Iconoclast. "How's that leg of yours? Up to a run?"

  "Honestly? No."

  "I didn't think so." Red gnawed a fingernail for a few moments. "Okay, here's the plan. I'll take a jog down here. You get to the ops room and wait for me to get the power up. Either it'll be easy or it'll be impossible, I'm not sure which yet. In either case, I'll join you there in a few minutes."

  They parted company. Red sprinted away down the track. She always felt better when she had a plan, a path to follow. A purpose. Her purpose now was erasing this sleeping monster before it woke up and swallowed them all, if only to see the look on the abbot's face when she did.

  Maybe it wasn't a very good plan. It did rely on doing some very tricky things, not least of which would be getting the power online.

  As Red had told Antonia, there were two ways that would go. Either the power was down because someone had switched it off, in which case she might well be able to switch it right back on again. In her years as a professional bounty hunter she had taught herself to use thousands of machines, from computer systems and door locks to tanks and starships. More than once her life had depended on being able to get her hands on some technical device and making it work, there and then, with no time for fuss. After a while, it became almost second nature.

  Not many of them had been from two centuries into her own future, of course.

  There was a second reason the power might be off. It might be broken. In which case Red would hightail it back to the ops room and bug out. How she could do so without falling back into the clutches of the Iconoclasts would be something she'd work out later. There was no point making a plan too complicated, after all.

  The mag-car was waiting at the end of the track, just as it had at the drive chamber. Red had to force the door open. It hadn't been oiled and kept unlocked by a troop of deranged monks like the one she had passed through before.

  The second door was a little easier to wrench aside, and after that Red found herself in almost an exact copy of the locker-hall on the other side of the complex. The only immediate difference was in the big sign above the door, which this time told her she was entering the Tycho-Alpha Fusion C
ore. Even the radiation warning was the same.

  Thankfully, the massive double hatch into the power core was open.

  Red suddenly felt quite foolish. If the door had been closed, like the drive chamber hatch, she wouldn't have had any monks to open it for her. They much have used a portable power-supply to trigger the motors, but she didn't have one.

  She stepped through.

  The fusion core had been built on a similar scale to the drive chamber, although in a different configuration. The shape of it was more complex: a kind of truncated hexagonal pyramid, the walls studded with glass-fronted observation booths. The floor of the chamber stepped down in several wide levels, and in the centre was a vast cylinder of gleaming metal so tall it reached the ceiling.

  A faceted torus halfway up the cylinder was the fusion core itself.

  Red looked around. For a moment nothing gave her any clues, until she noticed that one of the booths - the largest - was still occupied. She could see the silhouette of a man's head and shoulders inside.

  She ran across the floor of the chamber and climbed quickly up the mesh step that led to the booth. The door was locked from the inside, but it wasn't strong. Red kicked it open.

  As she'd been expecting, the man in the booth had been there for a very long time indeed.

  She moved the desiccated corpse aside, and laid it out on the floor. The skeleton's hands had still been on a set of control boards, the metal beneath them stained with dust and rot. Red brushed away a last couple of finger bones and studied the board.

  Most of it was taken up with the same glass-panel control surfaces as everywhere else. Alongside that was a smaller panel, set with a couple of press-button switches and a small lever. A label next to the lever read "prime".

  She snapped it down, and when the buttons lit up she pressed them, too.

  There was a thump under the board, and a soft whine. The glass panel went black, then filled with diagrams, touch-sensitive controls, instructions, warnings.

  It was all here. She could do it.