The Encoded Heart Read online

  Smoke came up. The toxic liquid was starting to burn its way through the metal.

  Red coughed weakly. Her stomach felt as though it was trying to turn inside out, her throat as raw as an open wound. She flailed, felt a hand slap against the rail and held on, dragging herself up. She was almost blind. Some of the blood must have got into her eyes.

  Another Iconoclast dropped onto the bridge. She felt his boots hit the metal close to her, but there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it. Vaguely, through scalded eyes, she saw Ketta dart into combat with this latest assailant. Something bright flashed down, maybe a blade. The man roared, fell forwards with Ketta on his back, then powered up again. Ketta must have been caught by surprise, because in the next second he shoved her so hard into the handrail that the metal finally gave way.

  The agent teetered for a moment, then fell off the edge.

  Red snapped a hand out on reflex. She felt her fingers close against Ketta's wrist, and then the Iconoclast's weight slammed her face-down into the bridge floor. She snarled in pain.

  Below her, Ketta kicked and span. "Let go of me, monster!"

  Red shook her head. She tried to say something, but her mouth was a ruin, her tongue so swollen she could hardly breathe.

  It hurt so badly that, for a moment, she barely felt the staking pin punch through her right shoulder.

  At first she thought the Iconoclast had stamped on her, his boot crushing her down onto the bridge. Then she saw blood on Ketta's face, fat globules dripping down onto her from above, at the same time that the pain erupted through her back and arm. She moaned, almost letting go.

  The staking pin had gone right through her, pinning her to the walkway.

  "I have them!" The Iconoclast was standing above her, yelling in triumph. "Commander Hermas, the bitches are ours!"

  "I beg to differ," snapped Ketta. Her free hand came up, her trigger-finger tensing. A slab of black metal appeared so fast that Red didn't even see it move, and spat fire.

  Above her, the Iconoclast exploded.

  Superheated innards cascaded back over the rail. Red reached down with her other hand, feeling her shoulder tear around the staking pin, then grabbed Ketta and hauled her up in one last, massive effort.

  It took all that she had. Blackness fluttered around the edges of her vision as she fell against the metal.

  Ketta's voice sounded next to her. "Don't think this changes anything, monster."

  "Go," Red croaked. "Bloody go."

  "I shall. But not alone." She saw the woman's shadow move as the Iconoclast reached down, and felt her body tense.

  The pain as Ketta pulled the staking pin free was enough to black her out completely.

  "Monster? Are you suffering?"

  Red nodded. "Yeah."

  "Then the day has not been entirely wasted."

  She opened her eyes. Blurry colours leapt at her, light sending spikes of pain through her retinas. Her skull was pounding, joining her right shoulder and arm in a chorus of agony. Her throat was a column of gritty fire, her mouth a nest of thorns. The acidic reek was all over her; she'd vomited again while she was unconscious.

  She blinked a few times, trying to clear the fog from her vision. It worked to a degree, but there were patches of stubborn grey in her sight that could only have been scoring on the surface of her eyes. The thought made her stomach flip again, and she forced it away.

  If she tried really hard, summoning all her meagre reserves of strength, she found she could move her head a little to either side. The motion set her brain swimming in her skull, but it at least made her surroundings a little clearer. Gleaming outlines of light and shade to either side of her, with a rectangle of darkness above, and a mobile shadow that must have been Ketta herself.

  Red might have believed she was anywhere, were it not for the constant, bone-deep thrumming coming up through the base of her spine and making her teeth rattle. They were aboard a starship, but not one that she knew. And the main drives were at full burn.

  Her hands were bound, and there was a harness keeping her pressed back into a padded seat. Every now and then a force would shove her this way or that, the ship's changes of course acting on its interior before the dampers could compensate. Ketta must have been hurling the vessel all over the sky.

  Red coughed, spitting acid and bits of throat tissue. "Escaped?"

  "Barely." Ketta's voice was distant, preoccupied. "Hermas was weak enough for us to get past him."

  "Chasing us?"

  "No, monster. I'm doing this for amusement."

  Red didn't have an answer to that. She squeezed her eyes shut, rolling them behind their lids, and when she opened them things were slightly clearer. At least she'd not been struck permanently blind.

  She had a feeling, though, that her troubles weren't over simply because they'd left Biblos.

  Ketta had told her, in a moment of desperate candour, that she was no use to her dead. The fact that she was alive, but imprisoned, spoke volumes about the agent's intentions. Knowing the kind of people Ketta worked for, maybe it would be easier for Red if Hermas and his super-troopers did catch up with them.

  Then again, the man had called her a renegade. Red almost found the strength to smile. By the sound of it, little Nira Ketta wasn't working for the Patriarch any more.

  Maybe she could survive this after all. "Light-drive," she croaked. "Jump away."

  Ketta's shape moved slightly in front of her, and the ship swung violently over. "Damn, he's fast."

  "Feel sick..."

  "I regret that, monster, I truly do." Another lurch. "Considering I'll have to share this cabin with you for several days. But there was a ship waiting outside Biblos when we left... I can only assume Hermas had it stationed there in case we escaped."

  "Weapons?"

  "I can't bring them to bear! That cursed ship is the most manoeuvrable thing I've ever seen. Vampires included. And he's got some kind of damping field on us, stopping the light-drive from... Oh, dear God!"

  Ketta's voice had turned into a cry of raw fear. "What?"

  "The field! Some kind of surge..." The ship made one last rollercoaster swoop that almost threw Red out of her seat, harness or no harness, and then all the lights went out. The thrumming of the drives faltered like a dying heart, and ceased.

  Red felt wisps of invisible energy crackling over her skin, worming through her hair, over her eyeballs, into the wound in her shoulder and the ragged tissue of her mouth. She screamed in pain.

  There was no light at all. She was blind again.

  Past the fading crackle of residual energy, she listened. Footsteps went past her at Ketta's cat-light pace, and there was the click and whine of a weapon being readied. From somewhere else came more distant, metallic thumps and crashes.

  "They're boarding," said Ketta. "Monster, I can kill you now if you wish. It might save you further pain."

  She shook her head; once left, once right. "Take my chances..."

  "I'm glad." There was a soft creak of armour as the Iconoclast readied herself. "I was honour-bound to ask, but I'd rather your suffering continued a while longer."

  "Charming..." Red gasped, but a fizzing explosion from behind her drowned the word completely.

  Her seat rocked, as something vast slammed into the deck. Ketta started firing a second later. One, two shots ripped out into the dark, and then, from behind Red's seat, came a waspish snarl and a faint snap of impact.

  Ketta gave a choked cry, and fell heavily onto the deck.

  Silence. Then movement. Whispered voices. Red heard soft footsteps padding around her and then, in a sudden burst of light, a face appeared right in front of her.

  She jerked back in surprise, a reaction that set her head spinning. The face was bizarre, unreal; a harlequin mask in silver and black, the nose hooked down over a mouth that was half smile, half frown. Jewels glittered around its edge, and as tears beneath the eyes.

  "This one," said the mask. Its voice was male, but high-pitched and
liquid, its cadences strange. They were not, Red was certain, the tones of Hermas or one of his enhanced cronies.

  At that, other forms moved close, and her bonds were carefully cut away. The hands that freed her were gentle, but her injuries were great. There was no way they could have freed her without causing her pain, and nothing she could have done except but collapse into their grasp once the harness was gone.

  Despite her agonies, she remained awake through the whole process. Curiosity had her, its impulse almost as strong a motivation as the will to live. It kept her damaged eyes open as the masked troupe carried her out of the darkness and into the light.

  5. THE CRIMSON AND THE GREEN

  When the hatch between Matteus Godolkin and the Blasphemy had slammed closed, Godolkin had put his holy weapon aside and tried to force the door off its runners. It took him less than ten seconds to realise he couldn't do it.

  His strength was prodigious, his bones and muscles augmented by Iconoclast biochemical remodelling, honed by years of combat and hard, ceaseless training. But the hatch remained as solid as the wall. Whoever had caused it to close had activated the locks at the same time - it could have been a series of powerful electromagnets, or even simple metal bolts, that held it firmly in place.

  Godolkin drew in a long breath, focussing on it, magnifying the stillness in his soul with an Iconoclast catechism. It was a simple trick, one of the first mental disciplines he had ever learned, but it remained effective. The rush of anger in his chest faded, replaced by a serene certainty. If his tactics were sound and if God was with him he had no doubt that he would prevail.

  The solution was quite obvious when he thought about it. If the doors wouldn't open for him, he would make some more. He ran back to the reading room, raised the holy weapon and sent a burst of staking pins hammering up into the ceiling.

  The glass panels, delicately frosted and set into an intricate series of curving vaulted silver frames, erupted into a storm of fragments. It took only a few pins to destroy the ceiling completely. The framework had little structural strength, relying instead on symmetry and balance to hold the panels up. Godolkin only had to take out a square metre or two for gravity to do his work for him. In moments, the reading room was a blizzard of tumbling, shattering shards.

  He bowed his head as the worst of the storm came down, then looked up to examine what his shots had revealed. There was, as he had surmised, a considerable space between the elegant inner ceiling of the reading room and the thick, black glass of the cylinder roof. The space was filled with a maze of pipework and ducting, power cables and suspended lumes. Little remained in the area he had targeted, but the roof above it was surprisingly intact.

  Godolkin moved closer to the wall, switched the holy weapon to single-fire and put one staking pin into the glass.

  The pin slammed into the roof with splintering force, creating a crater the size of Godolkin's head. He stepped aside as debris arced down onto the littered carpet, and made a swift mental calculation as to how many pins he would need to get through, along with the best pattern in which to concentrate his fire. Then he began ripping a hole in the roof of Zimri's inner sanctum.

  The job took a few minutes. The glass was tough, heavily modified to support its own weight, and layered with a steel mesh for added strength. Part of the mesh must have been linked to the comms shielding too, because as soon as he had made a gap big enough to see through his linker went off.

  It was the mutant, Judas Harrow. "Godolkin? Where in the name of God have you been?"

  "I've been busy," he replied flatly, then switched channels. "Mistress?"

  He waited for three seconds before getting back to Harrow. "Mutant, is the Blasphemy with you?"

  "What? Damn you, Iconoclast, don't tell me you've lost her!"

  "We were separated," he growled. "I shall look for her. In the meantime, ready the ship, and run a bio-scan. This structure is heavily shielded, but you may still be able to locate her. Godolkin out."

  He shut the device down, cutting off Harrow's indignant protests.

  A few more pins made the hole big enough to scramble through. He ran to the nearest wall and began to clamber up it, hurling the books behind him as he climbed from shelf to shelf. They had rested on stout planks of burwood, easily strong enough to bear his weight, and in a few seconds he was pulling himself into the opening.

  The walkway was turning, but it was close. There were only a few seconds to wait until it was beneath him. He watched it rattling around, vibrating on its ill-maintained runners. And then, against his every instinct, he looked back down into the reading room.

  Zimri sat there, eyeless. Decay had already begun to bloat him; the chair was slowly edging back from the desk as his belly swelled. Godolkin's nose twitched at the stench rising from the body. In another day, the atmosphere in the reading room would be unbearable.

  Godolkin never intended to return. But still he raised his holy weapon and sent a column of searing flame washing over the corpse of Seebo Zimri.

  The burner fire was unimaginably hot, the self-combustion of its fuel approaching the temperature of thruster exhaust. Godolkin had a momentary glimpse of a shape in the midst of the inferno; a blackened skeleton shedding curls of blazing meat, falling off the staking pin and onto the desk. Then even that was gone.

  "Resquiat in pace, Librarian," he breathed.

  It was a waste of burner fuel, but he had plenty. Godolkin turned away from the pyre and jumped down from the roof.

  Combat had taken place on the walkway. The signs of it were everywhere.

  The handrail was bent and fractured as if from massive impact, and in one place was torn through altogether. There was blood on the steel flooring, although Godolkin had difficulty identifying its origin. The greater mass of the liquid, surrounding several threads of scorched offal trodden into the walkway, seemed to have a sizeable toxic component. One pool, a vomitous mix of poisoned blood and mutant stomach acid, had even started eating into the metal.

  But one small trail of blood concerned Godolkin far more. It was that of Durham Red.

  He knelt by its traces, noting the hole in the walkway it had poured through, the discarded staking pin that lay nearby. It seemed certain that the vampire had fallen prey to an Iconoclast weapon. She had been stapled to the bridge by it.

  Then someone had pulled the pin out, from metal and flesh alike, and borne her away.

  He had no trouble getting onto the landing bay, as the door from the loading hall was back under manual control. It was his biggest clue yet that whoever had been leading him, and the Blasphemy, through this accursed place was already gone. The thought added speed to his steps, but didn't stop him making a short detour to take the carryall of platinum from its hiding place.

  Harrow was in Hunter's command cabin. The mutant swung his throne around as Godolkin entered. "What happened?"

  He ignored the question, and the accusing stare that went with it. "Have you run the bio-scan?"

  "I did, but all I picked up was you. Godolkin-"

  "This entire situation was a trap, Harrow. The Librarian was dead when we arrived. Whoever killed him led us through the library and then trapped me in a shielded structure. While I was there, the Blasphemy was locked in combat."

  The mutant looked aghast. "Who with?"

  "Iconoclasts. There is evidence she fell prey to a staking pin." He set down the holy weapon and the carryall, and dropped into the command throne. "Re-hinge your jawbone, mutant. I am certain she lives."

  Harrow shook himself, then ran through the last of the yacht's pre-flight checks, tapping the controls quickly. "The Archaeotechs?"

  Godolkin shook his head. Even the Custodes Arcanum, the Archaeotechs' dedicated warrior division, wouldn't have been able to bring the monster to heel. She had been attacked by something far more powerful.

  The landing bay doors opened at Godolkin's command, and in a few moments Crimson Hunter was powering away from Biblos. "Harrow, begin a series of sense-sw
eeps. Highest resolution: check for plasma trails and ionisation from jump-points."

  "Right." Harrow got up and went to the sensor board. Godolkin, his attention on the flight controls, heard two or three keypresses and then a yelp of surprise. "Moon of blood, human! There's another ship out here!"

  Godolkin activated a slaving control, directing a holo-display from Harrow's board to his own. It sprang to life instantly; a glowing sphere of green light as big as his head, with a tiny triangle pulsing in the centre to mark Hunter's position.

  Off to starboard was something else: a yellow threat marker, surrounded by data icons.

  "Range ten thousand kilometres," Harrow reported. "The drives are idle, but she has power." He looked up. "Human, is that an Iconoclast vessel?"

  Godolkin was already turning Hunter about. "In part. Ready the flayer missiles, and then continue with the sense-sweep. This may be a feint - we have already been led a dance today."

  The data icons became more detailed as the range between the two vessels shrank. The other craft was, as he had told Harrow, a machine at least partly based on an Iconoclast daggership, a military interceptor famous for its speed and firepower. But so much of the vessel had been replaced or upgraded that almost nothing of its original outline remained. Godolkin noted multiple weapons emplacements, enlarged sense-domes, hugely overpowered thrusters mounted on variable-geometry winglets; changes that would increase the daggership's range and firepower beyond the dreams of the original designers.

  Flying a rather battered luxury yacht, with only two flayer missiles for protection, Godolkin found himself feeling just a little outgunned.

  He opened a crypt-link. "This is Johann Fahn of the Barracuda. Identify yourself."

  For a few seconds the link stayed dead, the screen nothing more than systems icons against a black field. Then the audio cut in. "You're a liar, heretic, and a bad one."

  "Major Nira Ketta," said Godolkin, hearing Harrow suppress a gasp behind him. "Why am I not surprised?"