Black Dawn Read online

  "An admirable notion." Godolkin was at the hatch already, shouldering it aside and ducking through into the ring corridor beyond. Red darted after him, hearing Harrow close behind.

  The only part of the ship not at local gravity was the central access tube. That was kept at null-gee, both on-planet and off, a single grav-blocker protecting it from Sirion's gravitational field. Red stepped into it, clamping her stomach muscles down over the inevitable jolt of weightlessness, and propelled herself down the tube to the middle deck.

  Fury had shifted twice more by the time she got to the bridge.

  As she went through the hatch she saw Godolkin dropping into the pilot's throne, letting the powered seat swing him around and slide him forwards into the confines of the workstation. Red stumbled past him, aiming for the gunnery station, trying to keep her balance on the shifting deck. She was quite grateful when the throne slid her into position and wrapped its safety harness around her torso.

  The control board lit up as she reached it. A few more taps at the controls brought up a series of external views, holographic screens popping into existence around her. Red stared at them, squinted, tilted her head from one side to the other.

  "I can't see a snecking thing," she said. "Are the sensors out?"

  "It's the storm." Harrow had settled into the sensor station, his usual spot. "There's so much ash in the air that it's blocking the sense-engines."

  Godolkin was stabbing at the flight controls, bringing the main power on line. Red saw him grip the control collectives and felt a shiver through the ship's frame as the grav-lifters engaged. She puffed out a relieved breath. Sirion had been a creepy enough place when the ground wasn't shaking about under her.

  A moment later the ship jerked forward, hard, and there was an agonised howl of metal from below. Red started upright in her throne, looking about wildly. "What the bloody hell was that?"

  "The landing spine," Godolkin replied flatly. "It will not lift."

  "Well take off anyway!" Something was horribly wrong. Red could feel a crawling itch between her shoulder blades, and her mouth was dry with a sudden, inexplicable fear. She didn't know why, but right now all she wanted to do was to get off Sirion. Whatever the cost.

  "As you command." Godolkin eased back on the collectives, but as soon as he did the ship jerked again, twisting like a living thing, and the metal howl came back as a nerve-tearing shriek. Alert gongs began clanging raucously.

  "Structural damage!" yelled Harrow. "Iconoclast, you'll rip the spine free!"

  Godolkin shoved the collectives forward. Fury dropped and slewed sideways. As it did so, Red's holoscreens cleared, just for a moment - some gust of wind, or downdraft from the lifters, must have swept the clouds of ash away from the front of the vessel.

  What she saw took the breath from her. "Oh my god," she whispered. "The ground..."

  In that instant of clear air, the ship's running lumes had spilled light across the ash-fields ahead of the ship. When Fury had landed the ground beneath it had been flat, only lightly strewn with debris and wind-blown heaps of dust. Apart from a slight settling under the ship's weight, it had been stable.

  Now it was a nightmare. It was a thin crust, a fractured surface that was giving way as she watched. A crater of shattered stone was expanding away from her, a spiderweb of powdery cracks that spat ash high into the roiling air before opening out, the broken ground shelving back into the hole that was tearing itself out of Sirion's shell.

  Omega Fury was right in the middle of it.

  Whatever lay beneath that crust wasn't strong enough to hold the ship's weight, and Fury was sinking fast. The landing spine must already have been buried beneath the stuff, the gyros fouled, the hatch and airlock swamped. No wonder the ship was screaming.

  "Holy one, I'm reading stress fractures in the landing spine and the lower frame." Harrow was speaking through gritted teeth, and his hands gripped the sensor board hard enough to bleach his knuckles. "The gyros are only just holding up - every time the ship moves it's putting torsion on the linkages."

  "We need to dig our way out," Red muttered. She was staring at the holos, watching odd chunks of debris fly up from the growing crater. Some of them, lifted high and whirled away by the storm, seemed sickeningly familiar.

  "By hand?" Harrow gaped. "Holy one, we can't go out in that! And anyway, Fury won't last that long. The hydraulics-"

  "Not us, Jude, the ship!" She reached across to Godolkin, and tapped his arm. "Thrusters. Point them straight down, use the downblast to cut through this stuff. Blow enough of it free to release the spine!"

  "There is ash in the nozzles," Godolkin warned, but she could see that he was already bringing the manoeuvring thrusters online. "The thrusters may detonate."

  "We're screwed either way."

  "A familiar situation," the Iconoclast replied, and triggered the thrusters.

  Red's holoscreens flared yellow-white, turning from the whirling sea of ash to a vertical inferno. Debris fountained upwards, flung out of the crater by the searing power of the thrusters, and the ship began to shake violently. Red grabbed the arms of her throne, hanging on with all her strength. It felt like the bridge had been set down on a giant's anvil, and was being roundly hammered.

  Debris from the crater began to rain back down, whipped in every direction by the maelstrom below. Some of it got close enough for Red to see what it was.

  Harrow had seen it too. "Moon of blood, holy one," he gasped. "Is that what I think it is?"

  Red nodded sickly. Even shattered and burned black by the thrusters' downblast, there was no mistaking a rain of human bones.

  There were thousands of them, millions. The entire crater was a sea of ashy skeletons, strewn in countless layers, corpse upon corpse. They were tangled together, crushed beneath the thick crust of powder and stone so that now, with the storm dragging at them and the thruster blast pounding them into the air, they were coming up in great bergs and reefs. Red saw a slab of compacted bones bigger than Omega Fury rise up with the storm under it, looming through the dust-clouds. It tilted towards the ship, teetering, shedding skeletons. A second later it exploded as a wind-borne chunk of debris sliced into it from below. The rain grew harder, hard enough to be heard through the hull armour: skulls and spines, slamming off Fury's rounded back.

  "Get us out of here," Red gasped. "Please, just get us out of here."

  "Almost free."

  "Sod 'almost', just get us out of this snecking place!"

  Godolkin didn't answer, just shoved the collectives forward and poured on the power. Fury vibrated, a deafening whine issuing from below decks, then leapt upwards. Even with the dampers engaged, Red was slammed into her throne, crushed back towards the deck by the acceleration.

  One of her secondary holoscreens was aimed at the ground. It had been a blinding sheet of flame since the thrusters had engaged, but now Red could see the crater shrinking away from her. For a moment it was spread out below like a hole in the world before being obscured by whirling clouds of grey ash.

  Skeletons, dragged up with the landing spine, were falling away towards the surface, joining the countless others that were spinning away in the wind. The clouds were peppered with them.

  Red closed her eyes. Watching the dead take flight was more than she could bear.

  The landing spine was damaged, but not irreparably. Once the ship was off the surface and above the storm Godolkin shut the thrusters down and coasted into orbit on grav-lifters alone. It made for a slow trip, but it saved having to risk retracting the spine in mid-flight.

  As it turned out, the decision was a wise one. When Harrow donned a vacuum shroud and went outside to check the hydraulics, he found bones wedged in the linkages: had Godolkin lifted the spine there was a good chance that they would have caused even more damage. Some of them were so firmly jammed that it took an hour's work with a pressure-wrench to free them all.

  Harrow tossed them as far from the ship as he could, but the remains shared Fury's
speed. They would orbit Sirion for millennia, until faint wisps of atmospheric friction finally conspired to drag them back to the surface. Until then, Red reflected, they would form an odd little monument to the planet's slaughtered population. Not to mention a grisly hazard to shipping.

  She set one of her holoscreens to track them, not really knowing why. Eventually, after several minutes of watching the grey bones turn over and over against the stark blackness of space, she noticed that Godolkin was looking at her sideways. "What?"

  "You are disturbed."

  "People have been saying that about me for years," she joked half-heartedly, then sighed. "No, you're right. Put it this way, I've felt better."

  He returned his attention to the flight controls. "Your behaviour often strikes me as extreme, mistress. I must admit, however, that I have seldom seen you so eager to leave a world."

  Red felt uncomfortable. The feeling of dread she had felt back on Sirion, even before the bones had begun to rise, unnerved her, and she wasn't sure why. Just the sight of the skeletons themselves had shaken her to the marrow, and she had witnessed far worse things in her time. No, there was more to her feelings than raw reaction. It struck deeper than that.

  She'd never admit it to Godolkin, though. "It was unexpected, that's all. Not every day you fall into a mass grave."

  "Indeed."

  Red switched the holoscreen off, and hit the key that released her from the workstation. The throne slid back, its harness unlocking. "Anyway, I'm going down to the ops deck."

  "Give Harrow my regards. And Blasphemy?"

  "Mm?"

  "Have you decided on a course yet?"

  Red stood up, stretching. "No," she said finally. "I haven't. Keep checking the damage, and get the short version ready for when I get back, okay?"

  With that, she stalked off the bridge, shoving herself down the access tube and onto Fury's lowest deck. As she reached it, the hatch to the port airlock ground open, and a sacklike mass of fabric shuffled through.

  Knowing he wouldn't be out of the ship for long, Harrow had used one of the standard-issue vacuum shrouds. Out in space the garments inflated to slightly outlandish, but extremely flexible proportions, making the wearer look like a balloon with stubby limbs. Red had worn them enough times to know that such shrouds were a lot more practical than they looked, and more comfortable to wear than the pressure suits of her own day. Back in an atmosphere, though, they deflated automatically, hanging off the limbs like a badly-made tent.

  Harrow reached up to the shroud's upper seal and began to strip it back. There was no helmet as such, just a transparent faceplate set into the upper surface. Red saw Harrow tug the shroud up and back off his head, wiping his sandy hair away from his face. He had been sweating hard in the suit.

  "Welcome back," she said. "How does it look?"

  "Not too bad, holy one," he replied, shrugging his way out of the shroud. "I think Godolkin will be able to retract the spine without further damage."

  "Great." Red watched as he folded the shroud loosely, and then stashed it in a decontamination trunk. Indicator lumes began to shine from the trunk as the lid locked down - the shroud was being doused with chemicals, readying it for the next wearer. "The hydraulics okay?"

  "I had to patch one leak, but nothing severe." He turned from the trunk, and looked at her oddly. "Holy one, are you unwell?"

  She shook her head. "I'm fine."

  "This has affected you."

  "Like I said to Godolkin, it was just a shock."

  Harrow cocked his head to the side. "I've walked with you amongst worse sights than Sirion had to offer, Red. I've never seen you like this before."

  She was about to tell him to drop it, but suddenly she didn't have the strength. She stumbled over to one of the staging benches and slumped back onto it, leaned over and put her head in her hands. "Oh, snecking hell, Jude," she muttered. "I don't know. I swear to God, I really don't..."

  "I do." Harrow crouched next to her. "It's Brite Red, isn't it?"

  At the mention of the name, Red shuddered. Of course, Harrow had seen what was bothering her even before she had. Either that, or she had been subconsciously blocking it out.

  Brite Red, the future version of Durham Red, had killed these people. By extension, the blood of every man, woman and child slain by the Manticore was on her hands.

  Every dead, silent world in the Manticore Gulf had been killed by her future self.

  Was that why she'd had Godolkin set down where he had? Red knew where the mass grave would be in the same way that she had known more about Brite's time engine than she had any right to. Perhaps more of that future knowledge had somehow filtered back through to her own mind. If that was true...

  "Sneck, Jude! I knew they were here, I must have done!" She bunched her fists in her hair, clawing at her own scalp. "I knew about the time engine, I knew how to kill the Manticore, and I must have known about the bodies!"

  "That's impossible," he breathed.

  "Is it? She's me, Jude, she always snecking was!" She leapt up, unable to keep still any longer. "Damn it, how many times do I have to kill that bitch?"

  "I would have thought twice was enough."

  The words were said so simply, in such contrast to her own distress, that Red couldn't help looking down at him. Harrow was still crouching by the bench, his eyebrows slightly raised, an open, honest expression on his face. Seeing it, Red felt herself relax, just a little.

  "Yeah," she said, smiling a little. "I used to think that too."

  She had never had to kill anyone more than once before, but Brite Red had been uncomfortably resilient.

  Their first encounter had been in orbit around the gas-planet Salecah, on the temporal platform that Brite had built to travel back into her own history. Driven insane by a thousand lifetimes of grief and loss, she had somehow decided to wipe out the past by killing her younger self - Durham Red. The two fought, but Durham Red had won the encounter and Brite had died on the floor of her platform, her throat torn out.

  If it hadn't been for Aura Lydexia and her Archaeotechs, the matter would have ended there, with only one nightmarish time-paradox for Red to lie awake and wonder about. But the Archaeotechs - an Iconoclast division obsessed with the retrieval of lost and forbidden technologies - had found the platform and stripped it bare, taking both the time engine and Brite's corpse with them.

  There was no way Red could leave a functioning time machine in the hands of the Iconoclasts, so she had pursued Lydexia to her base. The woman had escaped with both her prizes and had taken them to Ascension, a research station on the fringes of the Manticore Gulf. There they fell into the clutches of Caliban, a man obsessed with destroying the vast alien war-machine at the heart of the Gulf, the Manticore itself.

  Caliban couldn't have known that his attempts to destroy the Manticore would, in fact, actually create it. Sent back into prehistory by the Manticore's time-weapons, the wreckage of Ascension became the heart of the Manticore, and Brite Red's resurrected brain its control nexus. Each had created the other, a temporal loop born of fury and revenge. Brite had built the Manticore, and sent it ravening through the Gulf's human colonies, in order to seek revenge upon her younger self.

  Red had put an end to that plan, too but it seemed that even killing Brite a second time couldn't stop the madwoman from haunting her.

  Judas Harrow stood up. "Holy one," he said, "you will never be Brite Red. You told me that yourself, on the time platform. I believed you then, and every day I spend in your service convinces me of it more."

  "But all those people-"

  "Died at the hands of a monster. One that you will not become."

  She grinned at him, shaking her head. "Sneck, Jude, I wish I had your confidence."

  Harrow spread his hands. "It's simply a matter of faith."

  Red didn't go to her cabin that shipnight. She had been dreading sleep ever since the grave had collapsed, knowing that the massed corpses she had seen within would find their voi
ce again as soon as she closed her eyes. It was something she had experienced before, too many times.

  After her conversation with Harrow, it wasn't the fear of nightmares that kept her away from her pallet, it was resolve. There was something that needed doing, and she couldn't do it while she was asleep.

  Durham Red was going to find a way out of the Manticore Gulf.

  This was far easier said than done. The neutrino flare that Fury's sensorium had picked up was evidence of that. Any attempt to fly through the Bastion's multiple layers of defence would lead to annihilation, either in jumpspace or in the real universe. The vortex relays, the mines, the drones; no ship could get through that. If Red tried, she would be dead long before she came within range of the blockade fleet's guns.

  However, Omega Fury had one major advantage over any of the other ships that might try to escape. With the shadow web engaged it would become invisible to almost every form of detection. The web wouldn't function in jumpspace, though, nor would it mask the drive-flares caused whenever the ship changed course or speed. In fact, it was almost certain that the Bastion's commanders knew that an active vessel was in Sirion's orbit. The ash-world was only fourteen light-days from the edge, easily within drive detection range.

  The Bastion's ships had spent the past two centuries watching the Manticore for any sign of hostility. They had become very good at it.

  That knowledge was very much at the forefront of Red's mind as she entered the astrogation chamber. It was a place that she had seldom set foot in - a cramped, oddly-shaped room, set alongside the bridge and containing one control throne and a simulation board. Of the three of them, Godolkin had the most experience of interstellar navigation, and so plotted most of the courses. Red couldn't think of anything duller.

  She sat down and switched the board on. As she did so a globe of light faded into view in front of her; a gridded sphere of hazy green, half as tall as she was and studded with brilliant dots. Red blinked at it as it rotated slowly above the board. "The Gulf," she whispered.