The Unquiet Grave Read online

  Bad luck indeed, then, that she was on freighter escort at the time.

  The Shalem fleet was on its way back from collecting a planetary tithe. The mutant world of Broteus had given up its entire output of foodstuffs and materials for that solar year, loading it into bulk-freighters under the weapons of the Iconoclast vessels. The cost of the tithe was great - a tenth of the Brotean population would most likely starve during the coming year, but that was no concern of Antonia's. Besides, regular tithes were part of the laws of Accord dominion, and the mutant scum on Broteus bred like flies.

  All had gone well until the return journey. Antonia was anxious to be back at Shalem, ready to pick up any news of Gaius as soon as it arrived. In addition, she'd left the temple-station with only two killships and a handful of support craft as protection; standard procedure on an important tithe-extraction, but one that always made her nervous.

  The Shalem fleet, surrounding the freighters in defensive formation, had been preparing to leave orbit and go to superlight when they had been ambushed. One moment, the sky was clear. The next it was full of jump-flares and huge, slab-sided Tenebrae battleships.

  In seconds, half of Antonia's vessels were shattered, riddled with antimat fire and flayer missiles. Most of the weapons had been launched in the last seconds before emerging from jumpspace: the Broteans had known that the Tenebrae fleet was nearby, and given them Antonia's exact position.

  The battle was horribly one-sided. Antonia herself almost died with her flagship. The Tenebrae battlecuiser Eviscerator got close enough to Othniel to punch an antimat broadside clear through the killship's shields, ripping a track of blazing holes along her side. Half of Othniel's energy dampers, essential to the ship's protection, vanished in the blast. The rest failed seconds later as the overload reduced them to slag. Without the dampers there was no way for Othniel to absorb shield hits, weapons recoil and reactor heat. Even the stresses of manoeuvre could rip the ship in two.

  Accepted doctrine in such a situation was to accelerate Othniel to ramming speed and take as many of the Tenebrae with her as possible - the classic "blaze of glory" scenario. Antonia, however, held her own skin in rather higher regard than that, and instead initiated a phased shutdown of Othniel's systems. In a few, frantic seconds she managed to simulate a cascade power-failure throughout the ship, with such skill that Eviscerator, hungry for victims, had drawn close and opened her boarding hatches.

  At the last moment, Antonia had opened up Othniel's fusion drives to maximum thrust, sending five sun-hot tongues of raw plasma right down Eviscerator's throat.

  The effect had been as instant and brutal as turning a blowtorch on a human brain. Its bridge and command functions vaporised, drives flaring, the lobotomised battlecruiser went whirling out of control. Two frigates took it without trying.

  That had given Antonia just enough of a gap to take Othniel, and the remnants of her fleet, into superlight and away. She'd had to leave at least three ships behind, their phased-transfer engines crippled. She could only hope they'd been able to blow their own reactors before the Tenebrae boarded them.

  Othniel's crew had cheered on her return to Shalem, but Antonia couldn't see the result as anything less than absolute disaster. In one battle she had effectively lost the temple-station's protective fleet, leaving it with only two active killships and its own integral weapons to rely on. Had the Tenebrae followed them through jumpspace, they could have taken the base with ease. Luckily, they had stayed to plunder the freighters, and soon after that the uprising had faltered.

  The Blasphemy had vanished, never to be seen again.

  Antonia took one more look at the slate, and then tossed it with considerable force against the nearest wall. It bounced off and clattered to the floor, as if it was unbreakable. She was glaring at it, resolving to stomp on it later, when the door slammed open and Gordia skated to a halt on the marble floor. "Het Admiral!"

  Gordia was in full battle-gear, her outline almost totally submerged beneath multiple layers of powered armour, and her bolter was raised and primed. Antonia raised an eyebrow.

  "I dropped a dataslate, Gordia. Tell me, in what way does that sound like an assassination?"

  Only Gordia's eyes were visible above her gas-mask. They blinked ingenuously. "I am not sure, Het Admiral. Exactly what does an assassination sound like?"

  Antonia eyed the report. "Stick around, Gordia. You may find out." She stood up, and stretched. "I'm going to bed. Rouse me at 05.00."

  Gordia nodded, the armour's bulk turning the gesture into a bob of her entire upper body. "By your command, Het."

  "Oh, and Gordia? Next time you hear me being slaughtered, please make sure I've not just dropped a pen."

  Hours passed. She lay awake in the darkness, watching digits roll down the face of her clock-display.

  Antonia slept little at the best of times, and these days she could go for a week without sleeping at all. It was quite possible for Iconoclasts to do that on a regular basis - they were built for it - but it wasn't a habit Antonia liked or encouraged. For her own part, she craved a good night's sleep.

  But Gaius was still missing. While there was no word of him, she could not rest.

  If asked how long it had been since the Broteus incident Antonia would have had to check a diary to get an exact figure. However, she knew that Special Agent Gaius had been officially missing for twenty-nine days, seven hours and sixteen minutes. The first transmission he had ever failed to make was that long ago.

  Antonia also knew that it was thirty-two days, three hours and eleven minutes since Gaius had last shared her bed.

  It was an insane thing, for them to fall in love. They had once sat together in this very bed and worked out exactly how many Iconoclast protocols such a relationship contravened. Their desires had overtaken them before they had finished counting, but it was a lot. If anyone had ever found out, they would both have been at best reduced in rank, and at worst executed. Lucky for them both that Gordia could be trusted not to hear everything that went on in the admiral's chambers, if she was so ordered.

  Maybe, Antonia had once thought, execution would not have been the worst punishment: to be separated from Gaius would have been fouler. Immediately she had dismissed the thought as soppy, girlish nonsense, emotionally weak. Now, she realised, she had been right.

  His absence was torture.

  Antonia sat up in the bed and hunched, hugging her knees. She had done everything in her power to find Gaius, save abandoning her commission and hunting him down herself. She had managed to persuade Curia to send her another agent, and Major Nira Ketta was at present on the same backwater world that Gaius had last transmitted from. So far, though, Ketta had found no trace of her fellow agent, even though Antonia had authorised the activation of his tracer-implant.

  Not knowing - that was the worst thing. Imagination was not a quality actively sought after in Iconoclast officers, but right now Antonia had more than she could handle. A thousand fates for Gaius roared through her mind every second of the day.

  A thought struck her out of nowhere and Antonia's breath caught. Could Novabane have been saved if she had not been thinking about Gaius?

  She tried to shake the thought away. It was too horrible. If her own failings had cost the ship and so many lives, that was bad enough, but for her feelings for Gaius to have done the same...

  Antonia put her head in her hands. What was happening to her? She didn't feel like an admiral any more. She didn't even feel like an Iconoclast.

  Was she really so lost?

  A soft, almost inaudible chiming broke through her thoughts. The comm-linker was picking up a signal.

  Antonia leapt from the bed and darted through to the office. The linker was built into the desk, set under the polished surface. A tiny square of light blinked there, faint green in the darkness. Antonia put her fingertip to it, and the linker's screen and controls lit up across the desktop.

  There was no picture. Major Ketta was too far from Accord sp
ace to be able to transmit over the usual cipher channels, and was instead reduced to punching a massively compressed datastream through jumpspace. Scratchy audio was the best she could hope for.

  The desk hissed static. Antonia lowered the volume and leaned in close. "Ketta?"

  There was nothing for several seconds, just the white noise of jumpspace interference. It rose and fell rhythmically, like waves on a distant shore. As Antonia listened, the noise seemed to resolve itself, become more defined. It was almost like voices, many voices, impossibly far away. They were saying something to her. If she could just hear a little better...

  "Het Admiral..."

  Antonia closed her eyes. She could tell, just from Ketta's voice, that something was horribly wrong.

  The Iconoclast special agents were a breed apart. In terms of resources they were more expensive than a platoon of shocktroopers; in terms of effectiveness they were unparalleled. Rebuilt and modified in ways that made the best Iconoclast soldiers look like crude toys, they were trained in the most lethal forms of combat available. They were specialists in subversion, covert operations, espionage and assassination. They were experts in poisons and bio-weapons of every kind. They were the ultimate warriors.

  And Major Nira Ketta, highest-ranking agent this side of the Balrog Cusp, sounded as though she was going to be sick.

  "Ketta, in the name of God-"

  "He's dead," Ketta gasped thickly. "They're all dead. Forgive me, Het Admiral. Oh God, the sight! If you could only see-"

  "Major! Control yourself!" Fine words, Antonia thought angrily. Her own tears were already hitting the desktop. "Are you sure? Tell me that you're sure!"

  "I'm sure."

  "You followed the implant?"

  "I saw the implant!" Ketta's voice was almost a scream. "I saw it! Holy God, you have to get me out of here!"

  "Ketta-"

  "I need extraction, immediately. Please, Het Admiral, get me off this world!"

  Antonia cut the transmission. She wiped her eyes, straightened, and padded to the door of her chamber. It slid open at her approach.

  Gordia was standing outside, as always. "Admiral? Is there something you need?"

  She nodded. "Gordia, you may hear some... sounds, in the next little while. Be so good as to not hear them."

  The bodyguard nodded. "Understood, Het."

  "I'll see you at 05.00." With that, Antonia walked away from the door, letting it close behind her.

  She let out a scream that would have flung the angels themselves down from heaven.

  She summoned Tech-Prime Omri to meet her at the south lock of the Vault at 06.00. He was as prompt as always, his robes and armour wiped mostly clean of Novabane's soot, the eye-lenses of his sensory prosthesis polished and oiled.

  Antonia, for her part, was in full battledress. "I need Othniel," she told him simply.

  Omri turned his great head towards the dreadnought; Antonia heard the faint whine of servos in his neck. "We are on schedule, Het," he told her. "The upgraded sense-engines are en-route from Fernal, decks three-twenty through three-sixty-five are almost re-armoured, and the weapons loads are being fed in as we speak. Othniel will be ready for a shakedown cruise within three weeks."

  "I need her operational inside forty hours."

  There was a long silence, broken only by the soft whirring of Omri's eye-lenses refocussing. "That," he said eventually, "will be difficult."

  From experience, Antonia knew what that word meant, coming from him. "Abandon the sense-engine upgrade for now. Pull all available helots from work on the other ships, and set them to re-armouring the exposed decks. We'll seal them and run with areas unpressurised if we have to."

  "Admiral-"

  "Wake and feed the operational hunger-guns and charge the antimat generators. Concentrate your efforts on drives, weapons and daggership facilities. Defence is of secondary importance." She lowered her gaze. "I'm sorry, Omri. But new orders have come in. We have a punitive mission to undertake."

  Omri bowed slightly. "Thy will be done, Het Admiral. Forty hours."

  "Thank you, Omri." She began walking away, back into the lock chamber. A few seconds later she heard his voice again.

  "Admiral? Where are you taking her?" She looked back over her shoulder and he bowed again. "For the fuel load."

  Despite herself, Antonia couldn't help but give him a wry smile. Fuel load, indeed.

  "Lavannos, tech-prime. We're going to Lavannos, and we're going to melt its crust all over again."

  5. SORROW

  Eloise

  Main sequence star, Class M5, Subclass 32664-A

  0.3 Standard Masses

  Eleven worlds, Tentrinn-Configuration Oort cloud

  Pyre - Eloise IV

  Distance from star: 2.8 Standard Astronomical Units

  Diameter: 19,270 km. Density: 3.8. Gravity: 0.95 SGs

  Axial Tilt: 18 degrees. Length of Day: 20 hours (GST). Length of Year: 8.55 SY (3,749.28 local days)

  Atmosphere Pressure: 1.08. Composition: Oxygen-Nitrogen-Trace

  Climate: Warm, avg 288 K. Primary Terrain Type: Plains, Hills

  Surface Water: 67%. Humidity: 80%

  Resources: Metals, Radioactives, Organics

  Some local industry

  Tourism, Arable Farming

  Population 3.2 Billion (Purestrain Human)

  Note: This entry under revision as of 809 YA

  Crimson Hunter's bridge was in near darkness. The ship was on its eight hour simulated nightcycle, with many of the internal systems powered down as the vessel sped through jumpspace. Its pilot was in much the same state: Judas Harrow slumped in the command throne, his hair flopping down over his face, snoring lightly. To Durham Red, sitting in the navigation throne beside him, he looked far younger than he actually was.

  Red had given up on sleep for another night. She was very close to Pyre now, and images of its destruction were too near the surface to allow her to rest. Instead she had come back up to the command deck and, taking care not to wake Harrow, had begun trawling the planetary database again.

  The entry for Pyre came up quickly. There were several pages of technical data, half of it translatable, the rest in a weird kind of church-Latin. Red hadn't been to mass in a very long time, so much of the information went over her head.

  The rest was unremarkable, although she felt herself smiling wryly at the "under revision" note. The population figure was wrong for a start, she thought, scanning down the page. As far as she'd been able to tell on her last visit, it was now zero.

  She sat back, stretching the kinks out of her shoulders.

  The ship was largely flying itself; sentry guns unfolded, sense-engines sniffing the ether for signs of trouble. The precautions were fairly pointless in a superlight jump, as every ship carried its own little piece of jumpspace along with it. The chances of two phased-transfer bubbles ever coming into contact were remote. Still, it didn't hurt to err on the side of caution.

  It wasn't a concept Durham Red had ever given much thought, but it looked like something she was going to have to get used to. Back in her own time, if people didn't like your face they'd try to shoot it off. In the Year of the Accord 809, you were more likely to get your planet blown up.

  She went back to the database and typed WODAN.

  There was a pause, longer than the one that had preceded the Pyre entry, and then the screen blanked. Three words scrolled up.

  No Longer Extant.

  Wodan had been a university world, a moon-sized space station constructed almost entirely from timber. It was where she had woken up, after Judas Harrow had lasered her cryo-tube open, and it was where she'd first discovered just how badly she'd overslept.

  And Godolkin's people had taken it apart trying to get at her. They'd blasted the wooden world to scorched shavings. No one had been left alive: untold thousands had burned there, humans and mutants alike.

  "No longer extant" was a rather bald way of putting things, but Red couldn't argue with the trut
h of it. Wodan, quite simply, no longer existed.

  She glanced over at the clock and saw that the ship would begin its deceleration in a few minutes. It was time to go back to her cabin and lie to Harrow that she'd been there all night.

  She got up and was about to close the database when a sudden thought struck her. She reached down to the keyboard and typed in TERRA.

  There was another pause. Data systems in the Accord were not fast, not compared to the old days. A lot of technology had been lost in the dark years that followed the Bloodshed.

  Red waited, making a bet with herself. "Razed by Tenebrae Assault, five to four," she breathed. "Turned into a giant training camp for Iconoclast soldiers, two to one. Left to rot as a galactic garbage dump, odds-on favourite."

  The screen changed. Red stared at the words left remaining, and realised she'd lost her bet.

  There was no colour left on Pyre. Everything had been burned up, washed out, rendered down until nothing but black and grey remained. Even the sun, filtering weakly through a drifting smog of ash and burned fat, was the colour of an old bruise.

  Crimson Hunter had set down near a coastline, unfolding a single landing spine from its belly and perching on its splayed foot. Ten metres up, wings spread for atmospheric flight, the yacht looked oddly priggish, intent on making as little contact with the ground as possible, as though in disgust at the state of it.

  Durham Red, standing on the beach, could hardly blame it.

  The sand beneath her boots was dark and sticky with rotted grease. Waves still lapped, but the sea was black, a thin sludge of toxic, poisoned water and carbonised human fat. Corpses rolled in it, bloated and disintegrating after eight months in the rancid stew. There was nothing left alive in the sea to eat them.