Durham Red: The Unquiet Grave Read online

  "Acolyte," one of them said. Its voice, a reedy grating, emerged from a grill mounted in the side of its neck.

  There couldn't be too much detail in their sight, Harrow realised. They could tell his rank by the broad shape of his clothing, but little more than that. He decided to try bluffing his way out. "Servitors. I've come to tell you that your presence is requested in the flight hangar."

  There was a faint chattering sound; crude relays working in the servitors' brains as they tried to process the new information. Harrow suppressed a shudder of disgust.

  "Negative," quavered the one that had spoken before. "New order cannot be processed. Existing orders are not open to revision."

  "It is time for the milking," said the other. "Step aside, acolyte."

  Milking? Harrow shrugged and moved out of the way, watching as the servitors stalked past. At least they hadn't raised an alarm. Presumably, it wasn't unknown for acolytes to try ordering the creatures about. It must have been something they were programmed to ignore.

  He waited, breathing hard, as the sound of their piston-engine footfalls faded off around the corner, then shook himself and carried on along the corridor. He had known that the Osculum Cruentus had a reputation for harbouring horrors, but things here were worse than he could have imagined.

  Were the servitors also suffering? Were the people they had once been still in there somewhere?

  The corridor angled to the right, which Harrow felt certain was entirely the wrong way, and before long he found himself at the foot of a narrow, winding stairway. He cursed and was about to turn back when he noticed light filtering down the stairs from above. There was a quality to it that was oddly familiar, although he couldn't put his finger on why.

  It was enough to intrigue him though, and he began to climb.

  The stairs climbed for quite a way—two levels, maybe three—in a twisting, looping spiral, before terminating at one end of a short hallway. Harrow paused near the top, peeking over the last few steps to make sure that no one was in sight.

  Compared to the treacherous stairs and the cramped, gloomy corridors, the hallway seemed bright and sumptuously decorated. Tapestries lined the walls and the ceiling was a high, vaulted series of stone arches. The far end opened out into what looked like a smaller version of the viewing gallery from the chamber, with a platform extending out into a larger space, ringed with ornate handrails.

  Light, blue-white and flickering, was spilling in through the far end of the hallway. Harrow had seen a similar stuttering glare past the armoured door in the Chamber of Sensation, when the priests had taken the bowl of blood to their priestess.

  Hardly daring to hope, he crept towards the rail, keeping his back against the wall. The room beyond the platform was large, maybe half as big as the Chamber of Sensation, and gave the impression of being perfectly spherical. As Harrow edged closer he could see arc lights set into niches in the curving inner surface, pouring out an incessant, painful glare. At least one of the arc lights was malfunctioning, and sputtering fitfully. The air stank of ozone and burnt insulation.

  The handrail was just like that on the gallery, black iron, worn smooth along the top by a century of use. Harrow peered over it and into the chamber below.

  For a second, his heart froze in his chest, solid as a bone. She was here.

  * * * *

  There was no furniture in the chamber, no throne or altar. Instead, the concave floor was covered with a deranged profusion of fabrics: old rugs, redundant wall hangings, filthy tapestries, even a discarded cowl or two. The litter must have been a metre deep, maybe more. It looked as though it had built up over decades, more layers dropped over the top as the ones below rotted away.

  And on this grimy, reeking mass lay Durham Red, the Scarlet Saint herself.

  She was clad in shapeless robes, and her once-crimson hair had been hacked into a messy, dull-looking halo around her wasted face. She sprawled over tattered, bloodstained cushions, her eyes closed, her breathing shallow. Her skin was a sickly white, almost transparent under the arc lights, and gleaming with sweat. There was dried blood on her chin and neck. It looked like it had been there for some time.

  As Harrow watched, shivers wracked her. This was no priestess. This was an animal, tied up and left to howl.

  He sagged back, feeling a queasy rage filling his gut. To have come so far, searched so long and found her like this… It was too much to bear.

  One way or another, he would have vengeance on the Osculum Cruentus.

  The time for disguise was over. Harrow shrugged his way out of the cowl and dropped it behind him. The floor around Red's unconscious form might have been softer than it looked, but Harrow didn't want to risk a broken leg jumping down to find out. He undipped the mono-bond line from his belt, fastened one end around the rail, and opened the casing's integral handgrips.

  He was just about to climb over when a door slid open below him.

  He ducked back and down, behind the rail. The armoured door to the Chamber of Sensation was still closed, he could see that from where he crouched. No, a smaller entrance had opened, showing dark against the smooth stone interior of the sphere.

  After a few seconds, figures stepped through the opening and down onto the crumbling rugs: servitors, two of them, and the snake-armed priest from the orgy. The servitors looked exactly like the pair Harrow had tried to bluff earlier.

  The altered slaves strode towards Red. As Harrow watched, one of them grabbed her left arm in its massive claw, and hauled her roughly up into a sitting position. She sagged like a rag doll in the machine-man's grip, until the other servitor took her by the shoulder, holding her steady.

  Her head, unsupported, dropped forwards. The robes she wore appeared to be open at the back, falling apart to reveal a white expanse of neck. There was something between her shoulder blades that should not have been.

  Harrow clamped a hand over his mouth. A black metal socket had been driven into Red's spine, fixed as brutally and solidly as the devices sported by those who suffered terribly in the orgy. The skin around it was puckered and grey-pink. It looked horribly infected.

  If Red had been awake, she would have been in agony.

  The snake-armed priest crouched behind her. He took a device from within his robes, something that was part bright steel, part glass. Making sure that Red was held securely by the two servitors, he pushed it into the socket at her back, and twisted it.

  There was the sound of metal locking against metal. And of Durham Red, whimpering almost imperceptibly in protest.

  Liquid, water-thin and slightly cloudy, began to fill a glass tube in the device. And suddenly, Judas Harrow understood.

  The milking!

  They were drawing off her spinal fluid. Kept drugged with huge quantities of Glow, she was fed with tainted blood from the orgy, and then the priests milked her spinal fluid for some unholy purpose. By the state of her, they must have been doing this for weeks, if not months. They had even inserted a valve into her spine to make extraction easier.

  Harrow slipped the plasma-derringer from its holster and thumbed the priming key. As soon as those bastards stepped away from her…

  Alarm gongs ripped out across the chamber, a deafening metallic chime. The sheer volume of it made Harrow wince and curse under his breath.

  Somebody must have found the dead acolyte he'd shoved into a cupboard.

  Behind him, a door slammed open. He whirled, still crouching, and saw a servitor guard barrelling into the hallway, raising the guns bolted into the severed stumps of its wrists.

  Harrow snapped the derringer up and put a shot through the creature's sternum. The plasma charge cracked like a whip as it superheated the air around the barrel, and the servitor's torso exploded in a crimson shower. The arms span away, wrist-guns firing on reflex. Frag-shells screamed around the hallway.

  Ducking shrapnel and debris, Harrow grabbed the mono-bond reel in his free hand and dived over the rail.

  The line paid out fast
, squealing, dropping him onto the stinking rugs before the priest below could even shout. He dived under the swinging grab of one servitor, but the second lashed out and caught him a stunning blow across the back of the head, sending him sprawling. The derringer flew from his grasp.

  He rolled over. The servitors had left Red to drop, and were hammering towards him. He scrambled away, dragging the light-drill from his belt and slapping it to full charge with the heel of his hand. A violet thread sprang from the nozzle, searing and bright, and when he played it over the nearest servitor the creature tripped over its own feet and collapsed instantly, severed cables spraying oil, sparks and blood.

  The second servitor paused as its colleague fell and Harrow drilled it clear through the forehead. It sagged to its knees and toppled, its suffering well and truly over.

  The priest was trying to get away, the tube of Red's spinal fluid grasped in his hand.

  Harrow ran at him, scooping the mono-bond reel off the floor as he did so. He flipped it, sending a loop around the priest's neck. The man took one more step and then his head came off.

  That was a surprise: Harrow had meant to strangle the man, to leave him hanging from the handrail, but the mono-bond line was thin and very strong. As the priest ran, his own momentum was enough to draw the line clear through his neck. His head dropped away in a hissing shower of blood and his jerking body fell in the opposite direction, tentacle arms wind-milling and thrashing the air.

  Harrow stared, resolving not to go climbing with mono-bond any more.

  Alarm gongs were still pounding. Durham Red had collapsed into a heap nearby, slumped pitifully against some rancid cushions. Harrow stepped over the body of a servitor and lifted her tenderly; she was frighteningly light in his arms. "Holy one? Can you hear me?"

  She made no answer, other than a slight flutter of the eyelids. To Harrow, that was enough. It was time to be away.

  * * * *

  Judas Harrow had searched long and hard for the Osculum Cruentus. It had taken him months to track them down, partly because they simply didn't want to be found, but mainly because he was looking in the wrong place. He was expecting to find their cult-temple on some backwater planet, or hidden beneath the surface of a forgotten moon. All the sites where one usually put such things.

  He certainly never thought to look for them in the heart of an asteroid.

  But there they were, and had been for the last hundred years, tunnelling away in the dark and conducting their loathsome experiments in pain and pleasure. Deep within the iron-black stone of a planetisimal as big as a mountain, hiding since their excommunication, only venturing out to harvest local planets for fresh orgy victims and servitors. Over the decades they had expanded natural caverns in the rock into a nightmare maze: the Chamber of Sensation, the spherical room of the priestess, and all the corridors, cells and halls surrounding them had been nibbled out metre by metre.

  Which left Judas Harrow with a unique problem. Even in the most crowded of asteroid belts, the distances between planetisimals are great, and starships are large, bright, hot objects in the icy darkness of space. An asteroid isn't something one can easily creep up on.

  Harrow had a ship of his own, a tiny super-light yacht he had named Crimson Hunter. Once in the Kantallis Belt he had managed to get it safely to within a hundred kilometres of the Osculum's rock, judging that the cultists would have set their sense-engines to detect larger prey. He had left the ship on the shadow-side of a planetisimal not much larger than a tower block, powering it down but instructing a small, unsleeping part of its systems to await his call. He then sealed himself into a stealth-coated vacuum-shroud, strapped another to his belt for Durham Red, and stepped out of the airlock.

  It had taken a long, lonely hour to reach the temple.

  Once he was there, he had located a small service airlock and opened it with the data-pick, making his way inside and closing it behind him before the temple's surveillance engines knew anything was amiss. He had stripped off the vacuum-shroud, hidden it and its twin carefully and then an acolyte had tried to stab him in the face.

  * * * *

  The yammering of the alarm gongs was giving Harrow a headache. It looked as though the dead acolyte was finally getting his revenge.

  He was scrambling back through the temple towards the service lock, the derringer in one hand, the other arm wrapped tightly around Durham Red's waist. He was leaning her sideways slightly so she would slump against him and keep more or less upright, but her bare feet were still dragging along the stone floor. Even though she was thin and light, Harrow found himself wishing that the asteroid's artificial gravity had been set a little lower.

  At least he remembered this route well enough. He had made sure that he knew it off by heart—could walk it in the dark if necessary—over the past couple of days. If life among the stars had taught him anything, it was to always have a good escape route handy.

  He rounded the corner into the service lock and stopped dead. There were servitors there, looking right at him: priests behind them, acolytes. They had found the vacuum-shrouds.

  The body of the acolyte he had killed must still have been in the cupboard, a nasty surprise waiting for the next man to put his cowl away.

  Harrow swung Red around so that his body was between her and the enemy, and loosed off three shots with the derringer. One struck the head of the closest servitor and detonated its skull, sending fragments of grisly shrapnel spattering wildly around the lock. The priests ducked back, but the servitors weren't so easily cowed. Harrow just managed to fling himself back around the corner before the air filled with exploding frag-shells.

  He fired another shot around the corner, hitting nothing, looking madly left and right for another escape route. Why had they discovered the body now? Didn't these people have a sense of smell?

  There was a doorway opposite him, although getting to it would mean crossing what was rapidly becoming a solid wall of frag-fire. He took a deep breath, counted to three and then dived into the maelstrom, keeping low and slapping out shots with the derringer as fast as he could pull the trigger. Its supply of ammunition wasn't inexhaustible, but if he didn't use it now he'd never get another chance.

  One of the shots hit a priest, blowing away everything from the centre of his chest upwards, and a second ripped a servitor in half. The survivors were packed in around the service lock, and that was Harrow's advantage—every time one of them fell prey to a plasma discharge, the others would be sprayed with his ruins. By this fact alone, Harrow managed to get himself and Red across to the doorway without being blown apart.

  He dived through, hauling her with him. Past the entrance were long racks of what looked like tiny accommodation cells, their circular doors identical and stacked three high. For a moment Harrow didn't recognise them, their design was so old.

  They were life-shells, programmed to open in an emergency and allow escape from a stricken starship or space station. In normal times, however, their doors were kept firmly locked, to stop people stealing their supplies.

  Which meant Harrow needed an emergency.

  He set Red down gently against the nearest shell, then took the acolyte's knife from his belt. He had to work fast; the fire from the corridor was beginning to lessen, as the servitors began to realise they weren't hitting anything. They could come stalking through the doorway any second, and what Harrow had in mind would leave him somewhat short of weaponry.

  The point of the knife was slim but strong enough to flip open the derringer's access panels. He stabbed feverishly at the gleaming components inside, snapping the safeties away from the ignition chamber, jamming the knife blade down into the charging cell. Red had showed him how to do this once, but it had been a while ago, and he'd had more time.

  From around the corner, he heard the piston-engine tread of a servitor.

  The life-shells were racked near an airlock. If they were programmed in the usual way, he wouldn't even need to fracture the lock, just cause superficial
damage; that should be enough to get the shells open. Harrow pulled the derringer's trigger hard back, feeling it stick. Instantly the weapon was scalding hot against his hand, and a thin whine rose from its insides. He ducked around the corner and threw the gun past the approaching servitors.

  He heard a priest shout in warning, and the derringer exploded.

  It wasn't difficult to rig a plasma-discharge weapon to explode—the things were notoriously prone to do so. Easy or not, the effects were spectacular. Harrow had to dive back into the doorway again as a searing column of white-hot flame spat back along the corridor towards him.

  The noise was amazing.

  He risked a glance back outside. The service lock was a roiling, smoke-shot inferno. Things moved fitfully amid the flames, but not for long. It must have simply been the effects of heat on flesh, scorched tissues twisting away from blackening bone. Nothing could have survived the blast.

  Well, he thought. That's it for the vacuum-shrouds. He darted back to the shells, expecting to see ranks of opened hatches.

  All of them were closed.

  The lock must have withstood the effects of the exploding derringer far better than the cultists inside. The plan hadn't worked, and in the distance, Harrow heard the shouts and sounds of weapons being prepared. Despite himself, he used a word he had heard Red say once or twice.

  "Bugger!" he snarled.

  At that precise moment, the airlock exploded again.

  The noise was worse this time, enough to drive Harrow to his knees, even around the corner and out of the direct blast. Hot wind whipped at him. Something in the fire must have grown hot enough to detonate—the servitors' ammunition, probably.

  After the blast, there was another sound; a thin scream of escaping air.

  The life-shells were beginning to open. Harrow chose the one that looked the least decrepit and dragged Red through the hatch and into the cramped interior, ignoring her murmured protests. As the hatch slammed and locked behind him, he found something to hang onto and braced himself.