The Unquiet Grave Read online

  "Help yourself."

  Just before the hatch doors met, he was gone.

  Ketta felt the ark lock into place. There was a groan behind her as one of the surviving, but stunned shocktroopers started to come round. "Pilot?"

  "Yes, Het Major?"

  "It's all gone really wrong. In a minute, one of the troopers will ask you for a medical kit. Please let him know where it is."

  "Thy will be done, major. Are you all right?"

  "Not really." She flopped back on the deck, quite hard. "I think I'm going to pass out now."

  She was right.

  16. CEREBROPHAGE

  Godolkin still had the holy weapon. It was huge, a flattened egg of metal that enveloped his right arm to the elbow, the forward end a gaping mass of barrels and sensors. It must have been heavy; as far as Harrow knew it would normally link into Iconoclast armour, with power-assist units helping bear the weight. Godolkin was carrying it one-handed as though it was a pistol.

  He looked up. The landing craft was wavering away, more steady than it had been, but still unable to gain much height. "Will they make it?"

  "They might." Godolkin had aimed the weapon at the craft for a while, but had obviously decided to hold fire. The bolter was a fairly short-range piece anyway. "Even in this low gravity, they will have to make several orbits before leaving the atmosphere."

  Harrow understood enough about starship operations to know that the dropship's pilot couldn't engage the main drives while there was any more than a wisp of air in the tubes. He'd blow the engines apart if he tried. "Just as long as they don't try strafing Hunter as they go past."

  "Something tells me they might have other things on their minds." Godolkin strode past him, moving easily in the light gravity, towards a crumpled mass of robes a short distance away. They had both seen the abbot fall, from what would have been a fatal distance on any normal-sized world. Even on Lavannos, he had built up quite a speed before impact.

  Harrow followed the Iconoclast. The abbot, he saw with some surprise, was still alive.

  The man was twisted horribly on the cold ground, his shattered legs facing almost completely in the wrong direction. He must have been in little pain from his injuries, though. Harrow could see that a staking pin had parted his spine.

  Under his breath-mask the man's mouth was full of blood and greyish fragments. Some kind of dried food, like a fungus. There was more in his fist; Harrow reached down and parted the man's fingers, took a slice of what he had been eating from him, and almost sniffed it before he remembered his own mask.

  It was thin, and flat, and oddly wrinkled around one edge. Harrow frowned, holding it up to the light.

  And dropped it with a cry of horror. The abbot, it would seem, had not been giving everything he collected to the Mindfeeder.

  The abbot chuckled weakly. "It isn't to everyone's taste," he whispered. "Even crumbled in tea, it affects different people in different ways."

  Godolkin was grimacing. "You fed me that foul brew?"

  "It helped the dreams."

  The Iconoclast put the barrel of the holy weapon very close to the abbot's face. "Say your prayers, monster."

  "Go ahead, Matteus. Pull your trigger." The man grinned, bubbles of blood soaking up between his teeth. "He'll be awake soon. Hungry. He couldn't live here, not properly, not be awake in our reality, the stars weren't right. But we kept him ticking over, five hundred years of sacrifice."

  "Did you think he'd be grateful?"

  "Oh yes, Iconoclast, as grateful as a man is to the bacteria in his gut..." He coughed, spattering the inside of the mask with blood and fragments of dried brain. "So go ahead and shoot. And then await his glories!"

  Godolkin reached down and picked the abbot up by the front of his robes. The man gave a weak cry of pain. "If you think that I would desecrate a staking pin in your flesh, abbot, you are sadly mistaken."

  And with one hand, he hurled the man through the air.

  Harrow saw the abbot fly past him, in a high arc, slam back onto the ground and bounce towards a crater. He clawed at the stone for a moment, but it was too smooth. He slid down into the depths without a cry.

  Godolkin was already striding away.

  Harrow ran to catch up, the thermocowl flapping. "What did he mean? About the stars?"

  "Old legends, Harrow. Nothing that you'd be wise to think about." The Iconoclast stopped and turned to Harrow. "We must return to the monastery. The Blasphemy is there, trapped beneath."

  "I agree. We'll find her together."

  "No, Judas Harrow, we will not." Godolkin glowered at him. "I will locate Durham Red. You will return to the ship and await my signal."

  "Why me?"

  "Because it's your ship."

  "Oh. Of course..." Hunter was still slaved to his crypt-key. It would need his bio-signs, or those of Durham Red, to lift off. "It's a long way."

  "The dead shocktroopers have integral grav-chutes still attached to their armour. I will adapt one for you."

  They set off, towards the broken, burning shape of the Church of the Arch.

  17. HELL AND BACK

  Red still couldn't believe how big the Mindfeeder was.

  She'd been imagining something the size of Crimson Hunter; massive, but not unthinkable. She'd encountered some pretty large creatures in her time, and most bio-viable planets had at least a history of megafauna. Antonia had made a mistake, she thought at first; the woman must have been looking at the wrong diagram or brought up an erroneous file. But the more data she'd collected from the ops room's systems, the more certain she had become.

  This animal was almost the entire size of the Moon.

  No. Animal was the wrong word. She had felt much more than mindless hunger when the thing's scream of awareness had hit her. This Mindfeeder, as the abbot had called it, was an intelligence of unimaginable proportions.

  If it ever truly awoke, the universe would be in very serious trouble indeed.

  "Toni? You still with me over there?"

  "In body, Blasphemy." Antonia had taken her helmet off. Her hair, freed of constraint, was shoulder-length and auburn. Her arm was strapped immobile over her chest, splinted by the armour's internal medical systems, and her leg looked as though it was still giving her a lot of trouble. She was, however, a picture of furious concentration, hunting through the ops room's files for something, anything that would give them an edge.

  Red would have liked an edge, but at the moment she would have settled for a clue. She trotted over to Antonia's workstation. "Anything?"

  In reply, the Iconoclast brought up another lunar cross-section. "This is a real-time scan. The builders of this complex had the entire Moon wired for study - if nothing else, we can track whatever the creature is doing, at all times." She pointed, tapping the glass. "It's moving."

  The perimeter of the mass, a few kilometres below the surface, was in constant motion. It writhed and billowed. "Nasty," said Red. "Makes me feel seasick."

  "My sentiments entirely." Antonia turned the chair round to face her. "Durham Red, we both know this entity must not be allowed to awaken. The psionic weaponry it uses might not be constrained by distance."

  "Don't tell me you've seen thing kind of thing before!"

  "Not entirely. But there have been powerful mutants, psychers, able to kill at enormous distances." She raised an eyebrow. "And none of them were the size of a minor planet."

  "Point taken. And believe me, I want to see this thing fry as much as you do. But we don't even have a blaster between us."

  Antonia turned back to the workstation. "Elementary military tactics, Blasphemy. When faced with overwhelming odds, fall back and observe. Information is power."

  "Yeah? When faced with overwhelming odds I normally go in with all guns blazing and kill them all."

  "We don't have any guns."

  "True."

  It was Red who found the video files.

  She had been working on the map table. Most of the controls in the ops ro
om were extremely self-explanatory. Two hundred years of technical progress had, it seemed, finally taught software designers that vast amounts of surface complexity were not the best direction to head in. The active, constantly self-modifying panels were a help too, as they quite often simply moved irrelevant controls away. Red still found quite a lot of dead ends, but she made far more headway than she had been expecting.

  Antonia, used to the baroque technologies of the Accord, was having more trouble. "These systems are a nightmare. They do not respond to any sensible protocols."

  "Just press things."

  Red had found a library of data files. She was scanning through them, awed at how many there were. "You know, I'm starting to get a feel for this place."

  "Meaning?"

  "Well, look." Red gestured at the screen. "This thing is chock-full of sensory data. I mean, real minutiae. Seismic readouts to ten decimal places, microwave monitors, lidar, graviton detection... Who the hell would need all this stuff? Two hundred and twenty thousand measurements of the distance between two gold plates a metre away from each other." She gave the side of the table a slight kick. "It's a metre, guys! Move on!"

  "Blasphemy..."

  "Oh, right. What I mean is, this place is just one big laboratory. They didn't just move the Moon, they had sensors and computers and scientists set up to record absolutely everything that happened when they did it."

  "A test bed," breathed Antonia.

  Red grinned at her. "Bonus points! If you wanted to move something really important, like the Earth, say..."

  "You would test out the theories on something expendable first."

  The Moon. These people had thought the Moon expendable.

  The Earth must have been proofed against its loss. Possessing the satellite did far more than simply give the world tides. Red was no geologist, but she knew that simply removing the Moon would have dire consequences for the Earth's crust.

  She blinked. The file tree she was scanning through had modified, and she'd been so lost in thought that she had missed it. She scrolled back. "Hello..."

  "What have you found?"

  "Videos, I think. Hope it's not someone's collection of porn."

  Antonia had risen from her workstation and was trotting down the ramp. "Of what?"

  "Never mind." Red found a file and brought it up. "Holy crap."

  A rectangle of black had appeared on the panel, filled with crisp white text. Tycho-Alpha Translation Centre - Synchro Test. 11.00AM EST 20-02-2395.

  "Twenty-three ninety-five," Red breathed. "We were right - more than two centuries after I went into the tube..."

  The black rectangle vanished, replaced by a camera-view of the ops room. Dozens of graphs and readouts lit up at the edges, jumping and fluctuating in constant motion.

  The ops room was full of people. Every workstation was occupied.

  A man appeared on the screen, dark-skinned, young. His hair had been dyed vivid silver and he was wearing a slender piece of technology on one side of his face, a combination data-monocle and microphone. "TA synch test one," he intoned. "Initiating primary sensor array Delta-Tango eleven. Modifying for feedback. Recording. Initiating primary-"

  "Dullsville." Red hit the fast-forward. The scene blurred.

  "A thousand years," Antonia whispered. "That man lived and died a thousand years ago."

  "Mmm." Red had to admit she was impressed. The recording must have been stored in a crystal matrix to have lasted so long intact. But then again, if the complex had been designed to test the translation of the entire Moon, and bring back the gigabytes of sensory data needed to make sure the same process was safe for Earth, they would have built it to last.

  They would have built it to withstand anything. Even time.

  The recording ended. Red cursed and scanned back a few stops, until the man's face reappeared.

  "Synch-test in T-minus five," he told the screen. "Four, all baffles holding. Generator online. Datalink confirmed. Two. One. Mark."

  Red held her breath. She could hear Antonia doing the same.

  The man smiled broadly. "That's a wrap, people! Good job!"

  Antonia gaped. "That's it?"

  "Good data coming in from all the other centres: Mare Marginis, Robertson, Kulik all giving good returns..."

  Red stopped the video. "Other centres?"

  Antonia raced back up to her workstation, as fast as she could with a dodgy leg. "So that's what it meant."

  "What meant?"

  "Mentions of those areas." Her fingers blurred over the panel. Apparently she'd gotten the hang of it. A wire frame globe drew itself onto the big screen above her workstation, studded itself with craters and became a hazy, translucent image of the moon as it had once been. Red looked up at it, and felt a surge of homesickness.

  Smaller spheres appeared on the screen, under the Moon's surface. There were four of them, arranged in a rough cross, on a tilted equatorial line. Tycho, Robertson, Mare Marginis, and Kulik.

  Four translation drives, each with their own research complex. Tycho-Alpha was only one-quarter of the system.

  "Once again," said Antonia quietly, "we have been seeing only one small part of the greater whole."

  Red was about to agree, and probably to swear, when the floor under her feet shifted. "Oh sneck, not again..." She grabbed hold of the map table and held on.

  It was under the floor, close under, just beneath the mesh. She could see the way the ancient foam bulged very slightly upwards, emitting small puffs of blue dust. Bucket seats swivelled on their bearings. A skeleton sagged slightly, and toppled onto the floor.

  Red watched its skull roll past her and come to a halt against a ramp. She was waiting for the scream.

  It never came. The feeling of motion went away. She let out a long breath and sagged slightly against the table.

  Antonia had her real-time map up again. "Blasphemy," she hissed, as though unwilling to raise her voice. She pointed at the screen.

  A loop of unknown material was sliding away from beneath Tycho-Alpha, unravelling as it did so. More loops were showing around the circumference of the mass, odd-looking prominences rolling lazily under the crust.

  "It's stretching," said Durham Red. "Not long now."

  There was one more video she wanted to see. The last one.

  It was a long file, the biggest one in the list. She scanned down to it and brought it up on the map-table screen.

  Antonia had joined her again. "I don't know what this will achieve."

  "I just need to see it. What happened."

  "What does it matter?"

  Red snarled. "It matters to me, okay? Now shut up for a minute and let me watch!"

  The text on the rectangle read "25-12-2396". They'd moved the Moon on Christmas Day. Red thought that was quite typical, actually. From Boxing Day 2396 onwards, lovers would no longer have anything silvery to meet under.

  The ops room, when it reappeared, was less crowded than it had been before. The dark-skinned man was still there, however, with a slightly more attenuated version of the monocle-microphone at the side of his head. They had been updating the whole time.

  His hair was golden, now.

  There was a lot of preparation and counting down. Red forwarded through most of that. "Come on, come on, cut to the chase."

  "Sequence begins. Final translation in T-minus five. Datalink confirmed. Optimus programme is go. Two. One. Mark."

  The screen dissolved into static. "Sneck," Red yelled, slamming her fist into it.

  "Wait," Antonia told her.

  As if in reply, the screen cleared again. The ops room was in a state of controlled panic. "Control, come in," the man was calling, pressing the headset into his ear. "Control?" He leaned back, yelling over his shoulder: "Does anyone know where the hell we are?"

  "No returns! Negative telemetry!"

  "Sir, surface temperature is rising, fast. One hundred fifteen, one-twenty, one-thirty..."

  "Holy shit, have you seen what's out t
here?"

  There was an incredible, awful sound, and the picture tilted wildly. That was when the screams started. The picture returned to static very soon after that and stayed that way for a long time.

  The only reason the file was so big was that there had been no one to switch the recording off.

  "I've got a ship waiting," Red told Antonia. "On the landing field, about forty kilometres from here. If Harrow's alive, he'll be there. If he isn't, well..."

  "We detected no ship," said the Iconoclast.

  "You're not supposed to. He'd had some modifications made."

  Antonia smiled grimly. "I'll pass the knowledge on. It will prove useful. In the meantime, what's your plan?"

  "The key to this is the Optimus programme. I reckon it's the system that links all the drives together, gets them to fire all at once. If we can find that and activate it, the drives should charge, fire, and send this place back where it belongs."

  "Which is?"

  Red tapped the screen. "You heard those poor bastards. Somewhere hot. Admiral, think about this: the Moon vanished a thousand years ago. Saint Lavann saw it reappear, glowing red, five hundred years ago. So where do you think it was in the meantime?"

  "In hell." The Iconoclast nodded to herself. "Five centuries in hell. While this thing grew like a cancer in its bowels."

  "I think this orbit was where it was supposed to go - it's too stable to be a coincidence. They must have set the programme up way in advance, to send the Moon somewhere far away, but safe, around a big landmark. A gas-giant. But it didn't go here at first. It stayed in transition, for five hundred years, then finally completed the journey."

  "You're guessing."

  "Got any better ideas?"

  "At present, no."

  "Great." Red began adjusting her clothing, ripping away the tattered remains of the bodice, her remaining glove. She took her broken boots off. "Your job is to stay here and get the Optimus programme running. You've worked starship ops all your life. It shouldn't be too much different from a light-drive jump."