The Unquiet Grave Read online

  "You are insane!" Antonia's eyes had gone wide. "A thousand year old computer programme, on unfamiliar hardware, to trigger four wormhole generators simultaneously? Oh, and with a suitable time delay so you can retire to your vessel! Have I missed any-"

  The ops room shuddered. Dust drifted down from the ceiling and three lumes above their heads cracked and went out.

  "Yeah," said Durham Red. "Getting it done before this place gets eaten for lunch, and us with it."

  Antonia gave her the sour eye. "And where will you be, oh great tactician?"

  "In the drive chamber. I've got to make sure those mad monks weren't screwing around with the translation drive while they were feeding their new god."

  Antonia watched the Blasphemy disappear through the far door, into the maglev car and away.

  She snarled a private curse and turned back to her workstation. There were a thousand things that could go wrong with the vampire's plan. The drives could very well be damaged - if not the one at Tycho-Alpha, then one of the others. The Optimus programme might be unusable, encoded, deleted. It might require a simple access code to operate, which Antonia could never know. The fusion core might not have the power to charge the drives fully, or the other translation centres might not have their cores up and running.

  A thousand things. It was insane.

  Luckily, Antonia had a few more aces up her armoured sleeve.

  The mutant was right about one thing - operating the Tycho-Alpha systems was not light-years away from operating a starship. After all, they were both devices for transporting vast amounts of material from one place to another. Technology could, in certain circumstances, evolve and converge.

  Not only that, but when the Blasphemy had switched the power back on, the ops room had returned to the same state it had been in when everything had been turned off. Many of the workstation programmes and applications had been in use when the madman in the fusion core had shut the power down, and had sprung back into life mid-command. Antonia, while pretending to be having a hard time learning how the ops room worked, had actually learned some very intriguing things.

  How the communications worked, for example.

  She set her station to search for all references to the Optimus programme, then switched seats. The comms system in the base was a distant relative of the ones used in Iconoclast starships. After all, it had been her own people, albeit a thousand years dead, who had moved the Moon in the first place. Further development had been largely halted by the Bloodshed. All things considered, they were far more similar than she could ever let the Blasphemy know.

  It wasn't easy to reprogramme the frequency-swapping systems of Tycho-Alpha's comms to hunt down an Iconoclast crypt-key, but she managed it.

  The maglev car got Red to the drive chamber in just a few seconds, but there was a hairy moment along the way. The service door she had seen before had been blasted free of its moorings and lay on the conductive track, along with a fair amount of rubble. When the car passed over that, it bucked wildly, and Red had visions of it being slung completely off the track by the electromagnetic imbalance.

  It didn't quite come to that. When the base had been new and fully operational there probably would have been some kind of inertial damping system to prevent such a wild ride, even if there was a slab of steel on the track. In these troubled times, it was up to the shape of the car itself, and the way it fitted neatly between its braces, to keep it stable.

  It did make Red a little wary of coming back the same way, however. She began wondering if there was a way Antonia could switch off the power on the track and let her run back. Then she returned to her senses. This was an Iconoclast she was thinking about. The two might have been working towards a common goal for the moment, but Red was certain that Antonia would try to double-cross or kill her as soon as the opportunity arose.

  It was important that she didn't let herself forget that. She tried to keep an image of Wodan, in flames from core to crust, fixed firmly in her mind.

  She wondered what had happened to the service door and then realised that it was from there that the monks had emerged to surprise her in the drive chamber. It must have been their way out of the wheel room. Not only that, but the Iconoclast assault on that very place had been conducted through there. When Antonia had ordered the corpse-cavern incinerated, the back-blast had sent the armoured door clear out of its frame.

  Over five centuries, the monks of Saint Lavann had woven their structures in and out of this lost base. The whole thing was a temple to the Mindfeeder.

  She left the car and trotted down the steps into the locker hall. The hatch was closed, but this time the power was on. The control pad opened it without fuss.

  Red wondered what she would see past the doors, but there was no sign of any tendrils yet. She edged forwards.

  The chamber was as she remembered it, with the vast black globe of the translation drive suspended above its shaft. Greenish light still spilled up from the gap around it. She went to a comm-panel set into the wall. "Toni? Do you read me?"

  "I can hear you, Blasphemy. Are you in the chamber?"

  "Yeah." No thanks to you, she thought, blowing doors off willy-nilly. "It all looks good from here. I'll start a detailed check now. How's the geek-work going?"

  "I believe I have the Optimus programme online."

  "Way to go, Toni! I take back everything I ever said about Iconoclasts being stupid, and that's quite a lot. Is there a delay set in so we can scoot?"

  There was a pause. Antonia visiting all kinds of curses on her, no doubt. "It seems that a delay will be part of the process by necessity."

  Red was able to walk away from the panel and still converse with Antonia as though the woman was standing next to her. Advanced stuff. "How do you mean?"

  "Blasphemy, the drives are very nearly autonomous. Once the Optimus programme is activated the drives charge up, each from their own fusion core. To prevent slight changes in the rate of charge causing an imbalance, each drive-sphere contains its own capacitor array. The power does not need to be connected after the charge is complete - each drive will hold a charge for some minutes, until Optimus considers them balanced, and triggers translation by quantum-inseparability link."

  "So we can wind them up and let them go?" She grinned. "Brutal."

  The gap between the deck and the sphere bothered her. She kept wondering when the tendrils were going to come swarming out if it. This time, with no monks present, she was able to walk up to the edge and peer down into the shaft. "Sneck," she gasped.

  "What is it?"

  The shaft was empty of tendrils, but impossibly deep. It stretched down away from her, straight and true, for kilometres, set with panels and cables and the glass tubes that were giving off that sickly green light. "It goes down forever..."

  "Beneath the sphere? I believe that is a wave-guide."

  Red was thinking about how long the tendrils were.

  There was an indicator panel set into one side of the sphere, and one of the braces had been widened into a deck to reach it. Red found herself trotting over a plank of metal no more than a half-metre across, set over an endless drop. "A rail or something would have been nice, fellas."

  She reached the panel and began running a series of checks. Her studies on the map table had shown her what to look for. "Capacitors at zero per cent, everything else is looking nominal..."

  "How much longer?" Antonia sounded oddly impatient.

  "Christ, not much!" Red ran through a second series of checks, this time an internal sensor sweep to look for microfractures. Any imperfections in the shell of the drive, and the translation would be aborted. Red had feared time and the continued eruptions of the Mindfeeder's tentacles might have damaged the casing, but the scan came up within acceptable limits. "Okay, I think that's it."

  "You wish me to activate the programme?"

  There was something in her voice Red didn't like at all. "Yes, admiral. Run it and let's get out of here. Send the bastard back t
o hell."

  "With pleasure, Durham Red."

  There was a distant booming sound. The lights in the chamber dimmed, then returned to full brightness, and when Red looked back at the display panel it showed the drive's capacitors, and those of the other three spheres, climbing up from zero. Five per cent, she saw. Six.

  "Okay, time to go." She turned away from the drive.

  The entire chamber vibrated. From far, far below her came an awful noise, a squealing, grinding bellow. The bridge quivered under her bare feet, and she had to grab at the sphere to avoid being pitched into the shaft.

  There was something moving at the bottom of it. A speck, but growing. "Aw crap... Antonia? I think we woke it up!"

  There was no answer. Red got her balance and ran off the bridge, back to the comm panel. It was active. "Antonia!"

  "Goodbye, Durham Red."

  "What?"

  "The task is done. The Mindfeeder will return to the dimension that spawned it, taking you along for the ride. You are not the only one with a ship waiting, Blasphemy."

  "Antonia! You treacherous bitch!"

  "I believe it says that on my warrant-chip, yes." The admiral sighed audibly. "My soul is already forfeit for working at your side, Blasphemy. So, before you say it, you will very likely see me in hell."

  The signal died. Antonia had cut the connection from her end.

  Red swore explosively and ran through the hatch. The mag-car was disappearing into the distance. She saw it go past the fallen door in a sheet of sparks.

  The walls of the maglev track exploded inwards in a dozen places. Tendrils foamed out, hissing and squealing, sparking and drawing back whenever they touched the conductive floor.

  She was trapped. And the drive kept on charging.

  18. JUMP

  "That's it," Durham Red muttered darkly. "Note to self: never, ever trust an Iconoclast."

  The maglev track was a seething, swarming mass of tendrils. They didn't like the floor - hardly surprising with thousands of volts singing through it - but they had erupted through the walls and ceiling of the tunnel in more places than Red could count. Shards of panelling had clattered down from the places where they had broken in and lay sparking on the track. Small fires had started, filling the tunnel with grey smoke.

  For an effective vision of hell, it was as good as Red wanted to see right now. Unfortunately, with the translation drive charging busily behind her, she was likely to get a better one very soon.

  She ran back to the sphere and peered over the edge of the deck. The moving speck below her was closer now, almost close enough to define.

  There was a new noise from the tunnel. A malevolent squealing. Red dodged around the sphere to see what it was.

  Some of the tendrils had started to solidify again.

  This time, they were not doing so randomly. A column of them a few metres down the track had twisted together, forming a mush of raw protoplasm. From this, spidery limbs began spewing out, shaped like the claw-implement from her dream, but expanded and multiplied to carry a vast, razor-tipped horror of armour and sinew and drooling, swivelling eyes.

  There was still no real shape to the thing - it was a tangle of squid-grey flesh and translucent bone - but it had already separated from the mass and was climbing quickly away from the tendrils that had given it birth. Its limbs were hammering into the walls of the maglev tunnel as it dragged itself towards her.

  The Mindfeeder was awake, and it had detected a foreign body in its system. It was building antibodies.

  Red hit the hatch control. The armoured doors began to grind together, too slowly. Two armoured legs, rife with staring eyes, pawed through before they could close, and began straining against the hatch motors.

  Snarling, Red leaped towards them, ducking under a swipe that would have taken her head off had it connected. She still had Antonia's knife, stuffed into the back of her belt. She whipped it out and slapped it into the nearest eye.

  It popped messily over her hand and the creature screeched in pain. Red felt that screech in her mind, a smaller version of the Mindfeeder's psychic howls. She ignored it, gritted her teeth, and began stabbing at as many eyes as she could reach.

  The legs drew back, suddenly, like a hermit crab snapping back into its shell. The doors slammed closed.

  For a moment, Red was left in silence. When she listened carefully, however, she could hear the tearing sound of that nameless monster clawing its way up the wave-guide to get her.

  Whatever that thing was, it was huge.

  The creature in the tunnel was beating mindlessly at the door. The entire drive-chamber rattled with every blow, and chunks of ceiling hissed down, bouncing and shattering on the deck.

  Red scrambled back to the sphere and over the bridge. The panel was still showing the capacitor charge level. Eighty-two per cent on each drive.

  She began tapping at the controls, horribly aware of the thing clambering up beneath her feet, trying to find a way of shutting the drive down. "Abort, you bastard. I don't want to go! Abort!"

  The screen changed. For a moment Red wondered if she might have succeeded, until she read the text flashing there.

  The Optimus programme had lost contact with the Kulik translation drive, and was trying to shut down the jump. There were system errors springing up all over the panel, warnings of data invasion, attack by outside agencies. Unknown material in the wiring conduits.

  The Kulik drive was still charging, despite the Optimus programme's shutdown call.

  Red stepped back from the panel. Suddenly, she knew what was going on. What had been going on since the beginning.

  The Mindfeeder was taking control of the translation drives. That was what it had spent five hundred years trying to do, after the first jump from Earth orbit had deposited the Moon into whatever hellish dimension it called home. The inhabitants of the complexes had gone insane from its presence, killed each other or themselves. One had retained enough sanity to try and thwart the Mindfeeder by shutting down the Tycho fusion core.

  It had worked, for a while. Until the creature had built up enough of its own power to make the rest of the jump to Mandus.

  And now it was going to do it again. It had tendrils in all the cables, all the ducts, every part of every base. Now it was awake, and it had full control of the drives. The Optimus programme was out of the loop.

  The Mindfeeder was going hunting.

  There was a deafening scream of tearing metal and shattering ceramic. Red ran back to the deck and saw that the hatch doors had been forced out of their frame at one corner. Armoured legs the size of girders were forcing their way through.

  She hefted the knife. "All right then, you ugly snecker. Let's go..."

  There was a whooping roar from outside the hatch. Red felt the deck shake, saw jets of flame billow through the gap. The armoured limbs went suddenly limp and toppled into the chamber, severed and burning.

  More explosions sounded out in the maglev track. This is it, thought Red. The base is exploding. I'm a dead girl.

  She hoped the blast, when the fusion core went up, would hurt the Mindfeeder.

  The hatches started to open.

  One wasn't going to move at all, wrenched half out of the frame, and the other was sparking and jetting smoke from its motors. It ground shavings of metal from its runners for about two metres, then stopped. Red raised the knife and belted around the deck towards the opening.

  Matteus Godolkin was in the tunnel.

  He was clad in full Iconoclast shocktrooper armour, heavy goggles covering his eyes, the integral breath-mask obscuring his mouth and nose. But Red couldn't have mistaken him for anyone.

  His boots were planted solidly in the middle of the track, sending up fountains of sparks. He had a holy weapon on his right arm, some kind of vast particle cannon in his left. Staking pins and cleansing fire were sizzling down the tunnel, ripping tendrils and armoured spider-legs to shreds. As Red watched, open-mouthed, a protoplasmic mass dropped from the ceilin
g, vomiting legs and claws. The particle cannon flared out a piercing thread of violet light, and the mass detonated, sending shards of grey bone and gouts of fluid everywhere.

  The Iconoclast turned away from the carnage, and ran in through the open hatch. "Do you require assistance, mistress?"

  Red shrugged. "If you've not got anything better to do..."

  "I have not." He whipped around, amazingly fast in the bulky armour, and stitched a line of staking pins into a tentacle, stapling it to the hatch. "There are more of those nightmares than you can imagine out there, mistress. I suggest we leave immediately."

  "Sounds good to me, but how? Through that?"

  "No," he replied flatly, and pointed at the roof. "Through that. Harrow?"

  "I hear you, Godolkin, but I'll need a marker." Harrow's voice sounded over Godolkin's integral comm. He sounded charged up and ready to go. Red grinned. Just like old times - fire, smoke and monsters everywhere, and two men who should have been the universe's worst enemies standing shoulder to shoulder, covering her sexy rump.

  Godolkin raised the particle cannon and squeezed the trigger. Red looked up, and saw the violet thread boiling up through the ceiling. She remembered what the abbot had said: This stuff runs like water if you get it hot enough...

  A massive metal foot exploded down from the roof.

  Godolkin grabbed Red and swung her around, protecting her body with his own armoured bulk. Tonnes of black Lavannos rock were raining down from the ceiling, crashing off the deck, shattering as they hit the sphere and spinning away in knife-sharp shards.

  The foot crunched down through the hole it had made and slammed down onto the deck. Landing treads folded out from it, flower-like, and a door opened in the flat forward end.

  Crimson Hunter's landing spine.

  Red jumped up, onto the steps and through the hatch, Godolkin right behind her. "Take her up," he snapped curtly.

  The spine began to rise, the foot coming off the deck. Red felt the temperature start to drop, the icy cold of Lavannos chilling her. "Guys, wait. Harrow, hold your position."