The Encoded Heart Read online

  Her stride faltered, and she stopped. "Blimey."

  "The turrets are automated," Godolkin murmured, moving to position himself between Red and the nearest guns. He put his carryall down onto the deck, leaving an arm free. The other was buried to the elbow in the gleaming bulk of his holy weapon. "I count six quad-mounts of heavy-calibre particle cannon. Primarily anti-personnel devices, although sustained fire could damage a starship."

  "Nice," Red replied. "And you missed a couple." She jerked her head back, at the turrets set on either side of the bay doors, just in case anyone tried to leave in a hurry. "Heard 'em turning."

  Godolkin raised his comm-linker. "Harrow?"

  "I'm right here," the mutant replied. "Do you want to come back in?"

  "Negative. Close the outer lock, but leave the reactor on standby." Godolkin gave Red a questioning look, and she nodded very slightly. "And bring the flayer missiles online. Target the bay doors."

  "As you wish."

  Red peered about, trying to ignore the way all the turrets moved as she did. The particle magnum was clipped to her belt, but she doubted whether she could take all the phalanxes down if things got nasty, and the bay was almost completely devoid of cover. She'd not want to get into a firefight here.

  It was a killing ground, if Zimri wanted one.

  "All right," she muttered. "I'll admit it's not quite the welcome I would have liked. But we all knew he was an antisocial bugger."

  Godolkin lifted the carryall again. It must have weighed a hundred kilos, with all that cash-metal inside, but if he felt the weight at all he made no sign.

  "As you surmised," he said, moving away. "Memories of Wodan must trouble him greatly."

  Red made a face, and hurried to catch him up. If the fall of Wodan kept Zimri awake at nights, she could hardly blame him. Every now and then it did the same to her - when sleep evaded her and the cool darkness of her stateroom pressed down like the lid of a tomb, it all came surging back. The reek of burning flesh and burwood, the chatter of Iconoclast bolters, the screams...

  Bolters. Red looked over at Godolkin's holy weapon, and groaned. What the hell was Zimri going to say when he saw that?

  "Shit," she hissed. "I should have brought Harrow instead."

  "And which of you," Godolkin asked, raising the container, "would have carried this?"

  "Point taken." Red could have carried the money, but it would have looked bad. Harrow couldn't have lifted it. "You could have brought a different gun, though. That one's not exactly tactful."

  "Blasphemy, the Iconoclast operation on Wodan was a direct response to your presence. You are more directly accountable for the destruction of the Great Library than I. We must hope that Zimri has passed beyond that fact."

  "Great." The two people Seebo Zimri would most have reason to blame for the destruction of his life's work were walking across his primary landing bay, with every turret in the place aimed right at them.

  "Um, Godolkin? Maybe you'd like to pick up the pace a little here?"

  "Were I not carrying this container, Blasphemy, rest assured I would do so."

  "Right. Do so anyway."

  She had only spoken to Seebo Zimri once, over a wobbling and heavily-encoded comms link some weeks before. Just after she had learned there was a very good chance he had the Lavannos data crystals.

  The crystals had almost gone to the Iconoclasts, which would have been the second time Red had lost them. It was bad enough that she had taken them to the Aranites of Lyricum to get them translated. Despite their reputation as experts in the field of lost technologies, the spidery little mutants were also, Red had discovered, thieving bastards. They had sold her out so that they could get their hands on the Lavannos data, and given her to a psychopathic mutant terrorist called Xandos Dathan.

  While Red had been trying to stop Dathan plunging the Accord into civil war, the Aranites had been downloading everything that lay within the crystals, storing it for their own use or to sell it on. When they had realised Red was still alive, however, they had suddenly decided that they didn't want the artefacts around them any more. Anyone else might have simply thrown the things out of the nearest airlock, but the Aranites were far too avaricious for that. Instead, they had put a call through to the Archaeotech temple-labs on Nicopolis.

  The Archaeotechs were a division of the Iconoclast army, but, as Harrow had said, they were very much a law unto themselves. Secretive to the point of paranoia, their techno-priests and warrior-historians travelled the darkest tracts of Accord space, hunting technologies lost during centuries of bloody war. It was well known that they dealt with the Aranites on a regular basis.

  So well known, in fact, that Red had been waiting for their procurement clipper when it dropped out of jumpspace.

  The Archaeotechs didn't have the backing of High Command. As the Lavannos data was proscribed as heretical, they had wanted a secret deal, a quiet exchange of resources that could be easily denied, but all they got was a flayer missile in the drive core. Red had got into the clipper and away with the money so quickly, the crew hadn't even sounded an intruder alert until she was on her way out.

  In one risky but exhilarating operation she had not only derailed the Iconoclast bid for the crystals, she had gained enough cash-metal to finance her own. It would have been the perfect solution if Seebo Zimri hadn't stepped in.

  But he was already with the Aranites, ready and waiting with his own bag of money. When the Archaeotechs failed to show up, the Aranites had been happy to take on the next highest bidder.

  Something occurred to Red as they crossed the landing bay. She hadn't noticed it at first, not with the gun muzzles following her, but she was starting to realise what was bugging her.

  "It looks a bit plain," she said.

  Godolkin raised an eyebrow. "In comparison to?"

  "Almost everything else I've seen in this mad universe of yours." She spread her hands. "Where are the columns, Godolkin? Where are the carvings, or the stained glass, or those creepy metal skulls you people love gluing to everything? Sneck, this place looks almost normal..."

  The Iconoclast shrugged, huge muscles sliding under the armoured battle-harness he wore. "Biblos was not always a library," he replied. "It predates the Accord. It was abandoned during the Bloodshed, its original contents lost to Harvesters and other scavengers. Zimri appropriated the gross structure decades ago, and fitted it out for his own purposes."

  "Which were?"

  "A staging area for his shipments. He roamed the galaxy looking for ancient texts and then stored them here for cataloguing and verification. Shipping them to Wodan was the final stage."

  "Ah! So he was here when you cooked the place?"

  "Here, or in transit." The Iconoclast inclined his head a fraction. "He might even have watched the Great Library burn."

  "Maybe that's why he didn't meet us at the door. He's pissed off at us."

  "Undoubtedly."

  An armoured hatch, big enough to drive a truck through, led off the bay. As soon as Red and Godolkin drew close it gave a grinding, echoing squeal and started to rise. Red paused, letting the hatch go up, giving the Iconoclast a quick smile as she waited. "This is it, I suppose."

  When the gap was wide enough she stepped through, hand outstretched, ready to finally greet the man who would show her the way home.

  3. HUSH

  Zimri wasn't there. No one was there. The chamber beyond was as lifeless as the bay.

  Red had entered a loading hall, a wide rectangular space with steel tables lining one side and a row of cargo sleds parked against the other. A smaller door occupied the far wall, solidly closed, and caged lumes cast a sullen, bluish glare across the plain metal floor.

  The sleds were laden with dozens of storage crates, heavy cubes of impact-plastic bound with iron, and more were stacked around the tables. Some of those had been opened, and their contents piled onto the metal surfaces for sorting; great piles of books, scrolls and dataslates spilling across the bright stee
l.

  Zimri had taken possession of a new shipment by the look of things, and not long ago. There was no dust on the books, no damage to the hall itself, nothing to indicate the loaders and sorters hadn't simply been called away minutes before, leaving their work where it lay.

  Nothing, save a crawling itch at the back of Red's neck.

  She stood still, gnawing her lower lip, listening hard. Apart from the faint humming of air recyclers and her own breathing, the hall was silent. Very carefully, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other, so the barrel of the magnum just touched her thigh and reassured her it was still there.

  She glanced over her shoulder as Godolkin stalked in past her. "He's taking this privacy business a bit far, don't you think?"

  The only answer he gave was to tilt his great head back and glare up at the ceiling. "Librarian!" he roared, his voice sudden and startlingly loud. "No more games - show yourself!"

  Red took an involuntary step away. "Jesus, Godolkin! Say that a little louder, won't you? I still have partial hearing in my left ear."

  "What do you suggest, Blasphemy? Wait here until he chooses to answer?"

  "I'll let you know."

  That itch wouldn't go away, though. She could almost understand Zimri not sending anyone to meet her in the bay: if he was fearful of visitors, as well he might be, it would be the perfect place to rid himself of any he distrusted. But Zimri was an obsessive bibliophile. Ever since the fall of Wodan he had been scouring the Accord for texts, his only aim in life to recreate the glories of the Great Library in this ancient, forgotten hulk of a space station. Why would he call his staff away from these latest acquisitions? If he didn't want Red and Godolkin seeing his newest treasures, he could have sent a guide and led them in by a different route.

  Red wandered over to the nearest table and scanned the books lying there. "Deus Sanguinius, The Cling Peach Cookbook, Cislunar Hit Singles of 2176... Quite a range." She turned an ancient tome around to squint at its title. "Kitab Al-Azif? Sneck, Dathan had a copy of this! Must be a real page-turner."

  "I believe the Abbot of Lavannos may have possessed a similar volume," said Godolkin absently, setting the carryall down next to one of the loading sleds.

  The door in the far wall opened automatically as Red got close, but there was no one behind that one either. Together, she and Godolkin moved through another four rooms, each devoted to the storage and cataloguing of books, and each as lifeless as the first. By the time she got to the heart of Biblos, the main section of the Library, Red had pretty much given up on finding anyone at all.

  Maybe Zimri had sent them all away. The sense-engine return Harrow had spotted might have been the entire staff of Biblos going superlight in the opposite direction, although Red could never imagine the Librarian himself leaving this place. Wodan was gone, Seebo Zimri would live and die in Biblos, she was certain.

  The centre of Biblos was behind a larger, more heavily built hatchway. Red had to open it manually to get through, rather than wait for it to slide away as she got close. She wasn't quite sure why, until she saw what the door led to.

  Beyond it lay a bridge, a narrow strip of metal meshwork no more than three metres wide, and maybe two hundred long, edged with waist-high handrails. At the far end of the bridge loomed a skyscraper-sized cylinder of greyish metal. Below was a sheer drop of terrifying proportions.

  Eyes wide, Red stepped out onto the mesh, feeling it shake slightly under her boots, and peered over the rail. "Bloody hell," she breathed. "That is a snecking long way down."

  She was at the heart of Biblos. From what she could see, most of the conical bulk of the library station was taken up by one gigantic open shaft.

  It was a kilometre deep, at least, and almost half that distance across. The cylinder occupied its centre, topped with a wide dome of black glass, and Red could see dozens more walkways, identical to that on which she stood, poking out from the sides of the cylinder all the way down. They appeared at odd angles, and not all of them were connected with anything at all. Those furthest from her, at the bottom of the library, looked like no more than threads in the hazy air.

  Wind, warm and stale, was blowing up from the base of the shaft, whistling mournfully through the rails and the open mesh beneath Red's feet.

  "Blasphemy," said Godolkin, nodding at the cylinder. "Note the sectioning of that structure. I would guess that each of these bridges has its own segment, and that each section can rotate independently of its neghbours."

  "But why would they rotate? Oh, hang on! I get it." She paced partway out onto the walkway and looked over the edge again. "If the bridges turn, and you can walk around inside the cylinder, then you can get to any part of the wall. Just go from one to another, all the way down." The walkway she stood on would also turn too, hence the difference in the doors. If the door leading out of the cataloguing area had been one that opened on command, someone might go through it when the bridge wasn't connected. Which was not advisable.

  Why would Zimri need access to the shaft walls, though? Unless...

  Red looked back to the part of the shaft wall nearest to her, and gasped. "Son of a bitch!"

  "Mistress?"

  "Godolkin, the walls - they're all bookshelves!"

  The Iconoclast followed her gaze. "Impressive," he replied quietly.

  That was an understatement. Red whistled softly, the sound lost amid the shaft's sorrowful winds. The outer wall of that enormous space was an insane grid of shelves, home to untold thousands of books. The shelves were continuous, angling slightly as they wrapped around the inside of the shaft, spiralling down away from her in an endless helix. Looking more closely she could see hundreds of narrow platforms connecting the shelves, precarious sets of steps, even ladders bolted to the shelf edges. Every now and then, mesh discs stuck out like fungi on a dead tree, each with a small table and a single chair. Reading platforms.

  Suddenly, the true scale of the Librarian's obsession became clear. It made her own hunger for the data crystals seem amost innocuous.

  There was a hatch at the far end of the bridge, a narrow doorway set into the cylinder wall. Red and Godolkin reached it after a couple of minutes walk - they had slowed towards the centre of the bridge, where the mesh seemed to bounce quite alarmingly in time with their footfalls. Red found herself gripping the handrails tightly when that started to happen, and being very glad indeed that Godolkin had left the carryall behind. There was an arch-shaped keypad mounted next to the door. Red pressed the "open" button and the hatch slid aside, onto the interior of a long hallway, the walls curving away out of sight. In contrast to everything else she had seen on Biblos it was clean and elegant; the floors were of polished wood, the ceiling delicately vaulted.

  Godolkin took a few paces around the curve of the hallway, and Red followed, keeping to the outside wall while he hugged the inner, covering him with the magnum. "There's got to be a door around here somewhere."

  "Here," the Iconoclast said suddenly. He darted forwards, past a tall panel of dark wood, and put his back against the wall on the far side. As Red watched he reached over his right shoulder and unsheathed his silver blade: the huge sword emerged like a magician's trick as he brought it over and down, extending from an empty hilt into two metres of razored silver in less than a second. "On three," he said. "One..."

  Red jumped forwards and kicked the door clean off its hinges. "Three."

  She dived through, even before the broken door had finished falling, rolled to one side and came up in a perfect fighting crouch, her magnum up and the trigger halfway back. Behind her, Godolkin barrelled through with his sword held high. "Librarian!" he roared.

  Red swallowed hard. "I don't think he can hear you."

  Finally, she had found Seebo Zimri. But it was far too late.

  She got up from her crouch and walked into the room. It was a big place, open and light, maybe three quarters of the entire upper surface of the cylinder taken up by one vast circular chamber. The impression of luxu
ry out in the hallway continued here - the floor was a sea of carpet, the walls consisting of row after row of exquisitely filled bookshelves. Soft light filtered down from a ceiling that, unlike the glossy blackness outside, was a dome of elegant silver tracery and frosted glass.

  Chamber music filtered gently from concealed sounders. That, even more than the airy comfort of the place, made the horror it contained all the more harrowing.

  Zimri was at his desk at the centre of the room, sitting in a high-backed leather chair. His head drooped forwards, and his long white hair hung down and trailed in the pool of blood before him, drawing some of it up like wax up a candlewick. The surface of the desk, pale wood polished mirror-smooth, bore criss-crossing scratches: in his final moments the man had clawed at it, hard enough to drive the bones through the tips of his fingers.

  There was much blood on the desk. It teased her nostrils, but it was old, clotted, rank with the stench of death. It made her nose twitch, her stomach tighten. "Whatever went on here, we missed it," she said dully. "Poor bastard's been dead a day, maybe more."

  Godolkin had moved past her, to stand by the Librarian's side. He reached down and moved a hank of trailing hair aside. Red saw what lay behind it and stifled a gasp.

  The blunt end of an Iconoclast staking pin jutted brutally from his sternum.

  There was no mistaking it: Red had seen those awful things far too often to ever forget them. A needle-sharp bolt of silvered steel, the staking pin was blast-fired from the holy weapon of an Iconoclast shocktrooper. Superstitious to the last, the Iconoclasts had designed it as an anti-vampire weapon, part of the holy trinity of bolter, burner and silver blade.

  The old man bore neither the marks of cleansing fire nor the beheading sword, but that didn't matter. The staking pin had gone in through his breastbone, shattered his spine and fixed him, like a nailed plank, to the back of his leather seat.