The Ace of Skulls

Nineteen

‘Somebody’s coming!’

Jez’s hissed warning sent them scampering back down the corridor and through a side door. Beyond was a small infirmary, shiny and sterile in a way that Malvery’s never was. They crowded inside. Frey left the door open a crack and pressed his eye to it.

Voices were approaching. Two men in conversation.

‘Then what’s the effective range?’

‘Ten kloms.’

‘Theoretically.’

‘Based on the Sammies’ measurements of an identical device.’

‘So, not actually tested at all, then.’

The voices were louder now, and Frey heard footsteps, walking fast and with purpose. He glanced round the room to check on his crew. Ashua was close to the door, listening, with Pinn crowding in to hear as well. Jez waited in that feral stance of hers that meant she was ready to pounce. Pelaru stood there fearlessly, arms folded; he even made a Sentinel’s cassock look good, damn him. Malvery was pilfering suppies from the medicine cabinet.

‘You know what we’re up against,’ said the first voice. ‘They want it kept secret. How are we meant to test its parameters when this place has become a refugee camp for every Awakener in Vardia? We needed more time.’

‘We get one chance at this, that’s all I’m saying. It’s our necks if we’re wrong.’

Frey saw them now, as they passed the door and continued down the corridor. Two middle-aged men, one balding and with spectacles, the other with unkempt hair and an untidy beard. They were wearing the standard issue Awakener cassocks, but unusually their cassocks were brown. Frey didn’t understand the significance of that. He wished Crake were there to shed light on the subject; he didn’t want to ask Pelaru.

‘Effective radius is ten kloms,’ said the balding one. ‘That’s all you need to say. Now tidy yourself up. They’ll hang you if you present yourself to the Lord High Cryptographer like that. Where’s your respect?’

‘Respect? I’m in it for the science. For the chance to work with something no one’s ever seen before. You know I don’t believe that Awakener nonsense.’

‘When you see him, you will,’ said the balding man, and with that they passed out of hearing.

‘Sounds like something we should be investigating, Cap’n,’ Ashua suggested.

‘That it does,’ Frey agreed.

Once the coast was clear, they sallied out and headed in the direction the men had come from. The interior of the building had an industrial feel to it, with steel floors and sterile grey walls. This wasn’t a place meant to impress somebody, it was a place where you got things done. The question was: what?

He covered his ear and listened to the earcuff again, but the signals were frustrating. Occasional garbled voices came in faint snatches, and none of it understandable. He heard Trinica’s voice once in a while, and she sounded relaxed and calm. That made him feel a little better. Probably they were all making nice, the Awakeners buttering up the captains with promises in order to secure their aircraft. But Frey wanted to know for sure; he wanted to know exactly what they were saying. This damned interference, though — he’d never heard anything like it.

Thanks to Jez’s uncanny senses they’d managed to avoid bumping into anyone in the corridors so far, but Frey wasn’t sure how much longer their luck would last. He was beginning to think that this whole idea was a bad one. He should have just taken a chance and trusted Trinica to tell him what she learned. But he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to look around the Awakeners’ base. He needed a card in his hand in case the Century Knights tracked him down, or someone stuck a bounty on him. The way events were going, it might be the only thing between him and the noose.

There was a sliding metal door at the end of the corridor, of the kind they used on the Ketty Jay, except considerably cleaner. Jez listened at it, then nodded at Frey. He pulled it aside.

Beyond was a small steel-walled room filled with a bewildering array of gauges, dials and instruments. A ledger lay open on a desk, full of scribbled calculations. Two half-empty coffee mugs stood cold next to it. Frey crossed the room, passing strange scientific devices of brass and glass. He could only guess at the purpose of half of them, and he didn’t care to. Behind the instruments was a window, and he went to that.

‘That’s what we’re looking for,’ he said.

They were standing in an observation room, set high up on the side of a large circular chamber. Around the edges of the chamber were banks of instruments: cabinets that clanked and chattered, bellows that wheezed up and down, gyroscopes tilting this way and that. None of that interested Frey. The prize piece was in the centre, on a pedestal, surrounded by rods and sensors and rot knew what else.

It was a tall cylinder, twice the height of a man, encased in a mass of pipes and protrusions that looked like they’d been carved from yellowed bone. Inside the cylinder, a bruise-coloured gas swirled, and little sparks of lightning flashed and flickered. At its four corners were squat, thick towers of some brass-like material that wasn’t quite brass. Their surfaces were trenched and pitted with what might have been language, or perhaps a form of subtle machinery.

He’d seen its like before. It was Azryx technology.

‘Whoa,’ said Ashua, who’d come up to stand next to him. Its very presence seemed to dent the world around it. ‘Is that what’s messing up your, y’know?’ She flicked his earcuff, which Frey found deeply annoying.

‘Must be,’ said Frey, batting her hand away.

‘It’s not,’ said Jez from behind them. ‘Not that. Something else.’

‘There’s something else in this building weirder than that?’ said Pinn sceptically.

Malvery had crowded in now. ‘That must be what the Sammies sold to the Awakeners,’ he muttered. ‘Whatever these buggers are up to, that’s the key to it down there.’

Frey looked across at Pelaru. His eyes showed nothing as he gazed down at the machine. ‘Any ideas, whispermonger? Any titbits you want to share?’

Pelaru’s eyes flicked to him disdainfully, then back to the Azryx device.

‘Alright then. I’m gonna take a closer look. Doc, you wanna come?’

‘Bloody right I do,’ Malvery said.

Frey took off his earcuff and tossed it to Ashua. ‘Keep hold of that, will you? I can’t handle conversation in my ear when I’m being sneaky. Everyone else, stay here. If those scientists come back, well. .’ He made a vague motion in the air. ‘You can handle a couple of scientists, can’t you?’

There was a hatch in the floor in the corner of the room. It was open, and they saw a metal ladder leading down into the chamber, secured against the outer wall. They descended and stepped out from among the banks of machinery, peering around warily as if someone might be hidden in here, waiting to catch them. There was a large door to the chamber, big enough to drive a vehicle through, but it was securely closed and there was no one else in sight.

Once they’d established that they were safe, they approached the Azryx machine. The coloured gas in the cylinder was hard on the eyes; it became disorientating if stared at too long. Parts of the device hinted at familiar technology, but that only made the rest stranger by contrast. Frey had seen the preserved bodies of the Azryx, and knew them to be human, but they seemed unfathomably alien nonetheless. Their works awed him a little. After seeing a Juggernaut in action, it was hard not to be afraid of what they could do.

‘Buggered if I know what it is,’ Malvery declared, after a cursory inspection. ‘We ought to smash it or something.’

‘I dunno,’ said Frey. ‘Remember what happened last time we tried to smash up a piece of Azryx tech? Wiped out everything within a dozen kloms.’

Malvery waited for his point.

‘We’re within a dozen kloms,’ Frey elaborated, measuring the distance from Malvery to the machine with his arms.

‘Never thought I’d hear you arguing against wanton property destruction, Cap’n,’ the doctor said.

‘Old age has mellowed me,’ said Frey. It was good to hear a bit of banter from Malvery again. His mood had improved considerably since Frey had decided to infiltrate the Awakener base. Frey gave himself a mental pat on the back for his excellent crew-handling skills, then remembered Jez and Crake and stopped patting.

Malvery resumed his study of the device. ‘You think the Sammies gave ’em an instruction manual with this thing?’ he asked.

Frey scanned the room, searching for something that might shed light on its purpose. Habit made him check on his crew, and he glanced up at the window of the observation room. Jez was waving at him frantically. He wondered what on earth she was doing. When he twigged, alarm bells went off all over his body.

‘Doc!’ he snapped, racing towards a bank of machinery at the edge of the chamber. Malvery huffed after him, and the two of them hid amid the clicking cabinets and whirling gyroscopes. Not a moment too soon: the door to the chamber hissed and slid upwards, and four Awakeners trooped in.

They were unlike any that Frey had ever seen. They didn’t wear the traditional cassocks of their order, but red hooded cloaks emblazoned with the Cipher, and fitted silver armour as exquisite as a Century Knight’s. Their rifles were polished and top of the line, and their faces were covered with red silk masks below their eyes. On their foreheads were more Ciphers, tattoos displaying their faith.

Frey didn’t need Crake to guess what they were. The Lord High Cryptographer’s honour guard. The supreme leader of the Awakeners was about to make his entrance.

A half-dozen Sentinels followed, along with a red-cassocked Interpreter and the two scientists they’d observed earler. With them came a tall hooded lady in black and red walking at the side of the Lord High Cryptographer himself.

It wasn’t hard to pick him out. The Awakeners dressed in an austere fashion as a rule, but not their leader. He was draped in white and gold, swathed in fine fabrics, and though he was small and bent with age he seemed to shine in the dim light of the chamber. An embroidered red mantle hung about his shoulders, and he wore a great golden collar that made his head seem tiny in comparison. That head was covered with a skin-tight white fabric mask that concealed the face totally, and across his eyes was a strange grilled visor that wrapped from ear to ear, giving him a disconcertingly mechanical look.

‘That’s the bastard behind it all,’ whispered Malvery, clenching a fist. ‘Just give me ten minutes alone with that decrepit son of a bitch. I’ll kick his arse to dust.’

‘Easy, mate,’ said Frey. ‘Lot of firepower in here. I plan to be around to see the good guys win.’

All eyes were on the Lord High Cryptographer as he shuffled into the room. There was something fascinating about that strange, anonymous figure. An aura, for want of a better word. He felt somehow precious and fragile. Frey wanted to protect him, and didn’t know why.

The Lord High Cryptographer whispered to the hooded lady, who bowed down to hear him.

‘The Lord High Cryptographer asks if all is in readiness,’ she announced in a ringing voice.

‘Everything is ready,’ said the balding scientist, with a warning glance at his companion. ‘The device has been thoroughly tested.’

The Lord High Cryptographer whispered again and the hooded woman spoke. ‘The Mouth of the Allsoul demands to know how quickly his great weapon can be deployed.’

‘We can have it aboard an aircraft within an hour, Honoured One,’ said the Interpreter, a tall narrow man with slicked-back black hair. ‘It can be anywhere in Vardia in two days.’

The Lord High Cryptographer conferred with his aide again. Frey felt a powerful desire to hear the old man’s voice. He could see why some people fell for the teachings: the Lord High Cryptographer commanded the room without even showing his face. Even the sceptical scientist with the beard gazed at him with a sort of bewildered wonder in his eyes.

‘The Lord High Cryptographer advises you that the time is very near,’ the aide announced. ‘Our triumphant assault will soon begin, and it will fall like a hammer blow upon the enemy. The Lord High Cryptographer himself will accompany the fleet in his flagship, such is his belief in our victory. By the Allsoul’s will, we shall prevail over those who seek to silence us.’

‘As the Code dictates,’ some of the assembled muttered.

Frey exchanged a glance with Malvery. Normally he rolled his eyes at the pompous overblown language that boring people used to sound important, but this talk of hammer blows and triumphant assaults worried him. It sounded like the Awakeners were planning something big, and soon.

‘The Lord High Cryptographer may rest assured,’ said the Interpreter, ‘the device will work as our Samarlan allies have promised. Our enemies’ weapons will jam, their lights will fail, and they will fall from the skies.’

Frey felt his heart turn to ice. He knew exactly what the Azryx machine did now. He’d experienced its power in the Samarlan desert, when an identical device had disabled the Ketty Jay and brought her crashing down. That one was destroyed when the Azryx city was obliterated, but there must have been others. The Samarlans had got hold of one, and they’d sold it to the Awakeners.

He saw in his mind’s eye what would happen if that device was activated in the middle of a fleet. Frigates, fighters, gunships, spiralling out of control or diving unstoppably earthward as their aerium tanks vented. Those that didn’t crash would just hang in the air, sitting ducks for the enemy guns.

Hundreds of aircraft. Thousands of lives. Rot and damnation, it would be a massacre.

He’d been content to drift through the civil war and let it work itself out without much help from him, safe in the knowledge that the Coalition could handle itself. But matters had become a whole lot more urgent all of a sudden. He’d never really thought the Awakeners might actually win.

‘The Lord High Cryptographer wishes to look up on the device with his own eyes,’ the hooded lady announced. ‘You will leave the room.’

Her peremptory demand was met at first with confusion and hesitation. Then the Interpreter clapped, and everyone outside the Lord High Cryptographer’s immediate retinue bowed and left the room. The door slid closed behind them. Only the aide and his personal guard remained.

Frey and Malvery hunkered down deeper into cover and watched as the hooded lady removed the visor from the Lord High Cryptographer’s eyes. Frey was disconcerted to see that the mask covered his face entirely, even the parts that were hidden by the visor. His mouth and eye sockets were mere depressions in the fabric; there was barely any nose at all. He was a blank, a ghostly mannequin.

The aide carefully slid her fingers under the neck of the mask, rolled it up and slipped it off.

The Lord High Cryptographer was ancient. His scrawny, wattled neck extended like a vulture’s as he leaned forward, gazing upon the Azryx device with an expression of idiot greed. His eyes were a starburst of red and yellow, irises like a spatter of blood and pus. His bald head was liver-spotted; his nose had all but rotted away. And when his puckered mouth opened in a sigh of wonder, they saw his teeth. Teeth like needles, long and thin and sharp.

Unmasked, Frey adored him, and the feeling filled him with horror. He’d never imagined it was possible for two such polarised emotions to exist together. His mind and his body were repulsed, but his heart swelled with something atrociously close to love. He wanted to believe. Had he not been so set against the Awakener’s dogma, he might have turned to the faith right then. There had to be something in it, surely? All those people couldn’t be wrong? How else to explain the sense of righteousness that emanated from this man, this great man, this

daemon

He said the word to himself and it put steel in his spine. He’d seen the face of an Imperator and he’d seen Manes, and he knew they were not so different. He’d seen the way a daemon changed its host. And in the Lord High Cryptographer’s face, he saw the same.

Once he’d been a man, but not any more. Like the Imperators, he had a daemon inside him. Perhaps he’d put it there himself, to acquire the powers it bestowed. Perhaps he believed his faith would overcome it. Or perhaps, more dreadfully, his own Imperators had forced him to it, turned on their master and made him one of them.

He didn’t know. He couldn’t guess. But he knew one thing. The Awakeners had used daemonism to create enforcers that allowed them to destroy the old religions. But somehow, over the years, it had got out of control. And the daemons were in charge now.

If the Coalition lost the civil war, Vardia wouldn’t be ruled by fanatics. It would be ruled by daemons. He gazed upon the face of the Lord High Cryptographer, and he saw the future, and it was unutterably terrible.

The creature crooned as it looked upon the Azryx device. It saw victory and lusted for it. It was a sound of such lascivious want that Frey had the urge to seize his revolver and shoot the damned thing right there.

But to shoot it would be suicide, and he couldn’t have done it anyway. The Imperators emanated fear, but this daemon was worse. It emanated love.

He saw Malvery struggling with the same feelings. His face was locked in a taut frown and he was breathing heavily. He wondered if Malvery might really pull out his shotgun and end it now, destroy the monster and the machine, whatever the consequences. It was the kind of stupid heroism patriots were prone to.

But Malvery didn’t fire, and the daemon’s face was covered once more. When they were ready, the aide opened the door to the chamber once again. The others were waiting outside. Words were exchanged outside their hearing, and the Lord High Cryptographer and his retinue left, accompanied by the Interpreter. The scientists stood in the doorway with the Sentinels after they were gone, talking amongst themselves.

‘We have to do something,’ said Malvery.

‘We have to get out of here,’ Frey replied, pointing to the ladder that led up to the observation room. At the moment the Awakeners were not watching the room, but if they came in, there was no way Frey and Malvery would make it to that ladder without getting spotted.

Malvery was reluctant, his mouth set in a grim line. It didn’t sit well with him, leaving something like that in the hands of the Awakeners.

‘Doc!’ said Frey sharply. ‘Who’s gonna tell the Coalition if we’re dead?’

Malvery gave an exasperated sigh. Frey had got through to him with that. ‘Come on,’ he said.

They slipped between the banks of machinery, keeping their eyes on the scientists and Sentinels, who were deep in discussion just outside the chamber door.

Keep talking, Frey thought. He looked up at the window of the observation room, and saw that Ashua was practically jumping up and down, beckoning them.

Stealthily he ran the last few metres to the ladder and went scampering up the rungs. Malvery came more slowly behind him, blowing out his moustaches with the effort. Frey’s muscles were tight with tension as he climbed higher. Surely someone would turn and see him? Surely he was so obvious that they couldn’t fail to notice?

But he gained the top of the ladder and no alarm was raised. Ashua all but hauled him through the hatch and into the room, then went back to urge Malvery on.

Frey picked himself up and checked on everybody. Pinn was staring out of the window with a puzzled look on his face. He looked even more vacant than usual. Jez was in a corner, crouched, her teeth bared. Pelaru squatted before her, hand raised, like a man calming a skittish dog. He looked over his shoulder at Frey.

‘The Lord High Cryptographer,’ said Pelaru, and for once there was visible emotion on his face. ‘He’s-’

‘A daemon,’ said Frey. ‘I got that.’

‘She doesn’t take it well when there are daemons about.’

‘I got that too.’

Malvery clambered through the hatch, and sat down on the floor against a workbench to catch his breath. Frey went to the window and looked down into the chamber. The Awakeners were still in the doorway; they hadn’t even come in yet.

‘What did they say?’ Ashua asked Malvery.

Malvery stared at her with a look of such despair that even Frey was affected. It took a lot to knock Malvery down, but this had rocked him.

‘Give me the earcuff,’ he said to Ashua. She dug it from her pocket and lobbed it to him.

‘We have to get gone, Cap’n,’ Malvery said. ‘We have to tell someone.’

‘We’re going, Doc,’ said Frey, clipping on the earcuff. ‘Just let me check on Trinica. .’

His voice tailed off as the sounds filled his ear. They were fuzzy and indistinct, but the words didn’t concern him. It was the tone. Shouting. Protests. Alarm. He heard an impact and a crash. Trinica cried out, and it stabbed through the confusion and pierced him.

They saw it on his face. ‘Cap’n. .’ said Malvery, a warning in his voice.

‘She’s in trouble,’ he said. He looked about wildly. ‘She’s in trouble!’

‘Cap’n, we have to go!’ Malvery insisted.

‘You go,’ said Frey. ‘Get out of here. I’m going after her.’

‘This is too important!’ said Malvery.

‘Yeah,’ said Frey. ‘It is.’ And with that he pulled open the door and headed off down the corridor.

Malvery swore. Ashua looked from the doctor to the departing captain in confusion.

‘Are we just gonna let him go on his own?’ she asked.

‘Y’know, I hope he rescues her, I really do,’ Malvery snarled as he got to his feet. ‘That way I can punt her pasty arse to the moon.’

He stormed out of the door in pursuit of his captain, and the others had no choice but to follow.