The Abyssal Edge - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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  The Abyssal Edge – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

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  THE ABYSSAL EDGE

  Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I

  'Whatever the officers of the Eighth Legion are recording in their own archives at this moment is a matter for their own black consciences. I am a legionary of the Thousand Sons. I deal only in truth.'

  II

  'Part of me wonders if my primarch will soften his own accounting so as not to speak ill of his brother, the barbarian Curze. I do not believe for a moment he will be anything but honest, but honesty can be naked, or it can be dressed in veils of mercy. Lord Magnus is a forgiving man - wise, where his brother is spiteful. Beneficent, where Curze is bitter.'

  III

  'The Devastation of Zoah marks only the second time I have stood by my primarch's side in battle. I am not blind to the honour done to me during this compliance, when I was in the presence of not one but two of the Emperor's sons. Nor am I blind to the mistakes made that led to the campaign's catastrophic failure.

  I seek not to shift blame according to subjective whim. I intend instead to assign fault, objectively and thoroughly, where it belongs. The Night Lords have already disengaged, leaving us alone. Doubtless they go to take their moronic viciousness elsewhere, parading their ignorance as the ultimate virtue, claiming they did only what had to be done.'

  IV

  'And so it comes to be that we stand here in the ashes, sifting through the powdery remains of revelation. It is too late to change a thing. Too late to do anything but mourn what was lost.

  Everything is gone. All is dust.'

  Ulatal lowered the data-slate. For a time there was silence, or at least something close to it. The sound of his own laboured breathing was wet and tidal, punctuated by occasional draws on his aspirator. Beyond the gentle, unhealthy sounds of his own continuing life, the chamber had fallen entirely quiet.

  'What do I do with this?' He tossed the data-slate onto his work desk, feeling the fluid in his respiratory tract shift as he leaned forward. Ulatal was more than a little weary of that liquid gurgle in his chest.

  'Forgive me,' said the servitor standing in the corner. 'I am having trouble parsing your query. To what are you referring?'

  Ulatal looked over at the dead-eyed, monotone creature, and waved a hand in the vague direction of the data-slate.

  'This. What exactly am I supposed to do with this?'

  'Forgive me, I am having trouble parsing your query. You appear to have indicated the chamber wall. Is this accurate?'

  Ulatal resisted the urge to scream. Instead he jabbed his finger against the data-slate's screen, hammering it half a dozen times with his fingertip. 'No, you piece of… This. This. The report. What do I do with the report?'

  The servitor didn't move, didn't even blink. 'Reports are to be organised, notarised and filed for pre-archival secondary processing.'

  'Why did they assign you to me?' This wasn't the first time Ulatal had asked the question. 'You're as much use as a rock in a game of regicide. How do I deal with a report like this?'

  'Reports are to be organised, notarised and filed for secondary processing.'

  'Shut up,' Ulatal said with dangerous calm.

  'Compliance,' the servitor replied obediently, and entered silent running.

  'And if you speak again in the next day cycle, I'll shoot you. That's not just a promise, it's a solemn vow.'

  He could do it, too. They'd not taken his sidearm away. Admittedly, he was never likely to use it in an occupational capacity again, but its familiar weight on his hip did a little to counterbalance the feeling of helplessness from the bloody fluid in his lungs and guts.

  The servitor stared at him, caught between conflicting imperatives. 'I must remind you that destruction of Expeditionary Fleet resources and materiel is prohibited under the codes of cond—'

  A needle-thin beam of concentrated energy speared through the servitor's chest. There was no dramatic impact, no bodily momentum crashing the cyborg back against the wall, just a scorched hole about the size of a thumbnail directly through the servitor's heart. It tried valiantly (or irritatingly, from Ulatal's perspective) to finish its sentence, then slumped down where it had stood. The bionic plate of its skull clanked almost tenderly back against the wall.

  Ulatal lowered the laspistol, cursing softly. Another thing the damn crash had taken from him: he'd been aiming for the bastard's head.

  Annoyed, and using that annoyance to mask his unease, he holstered his sidearm and rubbed his temples.

  'Now shut up,' he said to the twitching servitor.

  It said, 'Compliance…' on the third attempt. Then with blood bubbling from its mouth, the servitor obeyed its final order.

  Perdita came to see him later that day. A maintenance crew had cleaned the servitor away by the time she arrived. Ulatal's gaze flicked to where Perdita wore her new rank insignia on her shoulders and chest - and damn if that didn't hurt a little. She picked her way through the tumbledown chaos of his chamber, glancing at the las-burn scorch in the wall.

  'Don't,' Ulatal warned her. 'Maintenance already lectured me.' He gave a nasty little smile that only lifted one side of his face. 'I told them it was an accidental weapon discharge.'

  'I wasn't going to say a word, sir.' After a moment, she wrinkled her nose. 'Except that it smells like something died in here.'

  Ulatal took that judgement in the spirit it was intended. Bathing hadn't been all that high on his priorities since the crash. Bathing took three times longer than it used to, and hurt an order of magnitude above that. He could've taken the nerve-suppressors allotted to him by the medicae, but they left him dazed and exhausted.

  'It's not sir any more,' he pointed out.

  She could have flinched at his bladed tone, and he was surprised she didn't. It probably would've been better if she had; then he'd have been spared the gentleness in her reply.

  'It will always be sir,' she said.

  'Don't patronise me, Dita.' Ulatal practically grunted the words. 'How's the squadron?'

  'Adjusting. Did you see we're flying fleet patrol again?'

  Of course he'd seen. She was still sending him the bloody duty roster every week. He didn't know how he felt about that. Was it charity? Sympathy? Pity?

  He nodded to her question, not trusting his voice for a moment. Perdita straightened her uniform as she looked around the room again, not meeting his eyes. Throne, if Dita was coming in here and looking awkward, things really were bad.

  'You forgot to say I'm looking better,' he goaded her.

  As easily as that, the tension vanished. She grinned. 'You look no different from a week ago.'

  'Yeah, I'm a prince these days. I hear they're going to put my face on the two-credit coin.'

  She stood at sudden attention. 'Permission to lie, sir.'

  Now that was more like it. Ulatal found himself smiling too. 'Permission denied, commander.'

  'Yes, sir. Then it's with regret that I inform you that you look like shit, sir.'

  Ulatal chuckled. The slime in his lungs and guts chuckled with him, and he could've lived without that, but it still felt good to laugh.

  'At ease, commander.'

  Perdita stood at ease, then wordlessly used the edge of her boot to scuff some of his smallclothes under the bed. In her eyes, he read the disapproval she was too polite to speak aloud. His officer's quarters, once so ordered and pristine, were becoming a little… domestic.

  'So why am I here?' she asked.

  'Beca
use I need a new archival servitor. The last one died in an accidental weapons discharge.'

  She raised an eyebrow and hiked a thumb at the door. 'I can just leave, you know.'

  Ulatal smoothed his palm down his unshaven face and, with the awkward gait of the newly-mutilated, he limped forwards on the bionic limb that replaced his lost leg. He had to suck on his aspirator, and after that wonderful indignity, what was left of his face twisted into a half smile amidst the burn scarring.

  'You're here because I think I'm in trouble, Dita.' He handed her the data-slate. 'Look at this.'

  About halfway through, the colour drained from her face. By the time she lowered the data-slate, disbelief was fighting with discomfort for control of her expression.

  'Is this real?' she asked.

  Ulatal thumbed a code into his workstation, bringing up a hololithic display of a world with three moons, ringed by icons depicting two battlefleets.

  'This is Zoah, and… whatever its bloody moons are called. And this is the 3,283rd Expeditionary Fleet. It's broken up now. It wasn't a true Expeditionary Fleet at all, just another ad hoc armada forming when two Imperial fleets find their spheres of conquest overlapping.'

  He gestured to two of the icons, lighting them on the display and bolding their names. The first read Photep. The second, Nightfall. The flagships of the XV and VIII Legiones Astartes.

  'At Zoah, the unified host resulted in not just two legions being forced to work together, but two primarchs.'

  She handed the data-slate back to him. He took it, though he didn't want to. Neither of them seemed to want to hold it for long. 'So Zoah is real,' Perdita ventured, 'but what about the veracity of the events in the report?'

  Ulatal raised a finger, a teacher making a point. 'That's the question.'

  Perdita was watching him with an expression he couldn't quite read. The ambiguity surprised him, given how long they'd flown together.

  'What? Why are you looking at me like that?'

  'Did you ask for this assignment, sir? Or did they give it to you?'

  Ulatal snorted. 'I didn't want to be removed from active service while I convalesced. I think they agreed because they were scared that if I had too much time to think, I'd swallow a round from my sidearm. If you're asking whether I specifically asked for archive oversight duty, then no. I just wanted something to do.'

  He gestured around the chamber, in all its sparse grandeur. 'What amazes me is that there are ranking Crusade officers who spend their lives overseeing this work.'

  Perdita fixed him with a disapproving glare. 'It's a vital duty. This work is integral to the Great Crusade. To humanity itself. These are the records future generations will read, learning how we conquered the stars.'

  How grand. Ulatal's inner voice was slick and sly with the thought. How very grand that sounds.

  'It's a dull duty, Dita.' He grunted something that was almost a laugh. 'At least, it was until I got a report saying two primarchs now despise each other. None of the other missions I've archived were anything like this.'

  'I don't understand you, sir. You're diminishing the work with one breath, and fixated upon it with the next. You're shaking with unspent energy.'

  'I notice you're delicately avoiding the word obsession.'

  Her smile was a thin, sympathetic slice that softened her eyes. 'You said it, not me. So… what are you going to do?'

  Ulatal dragged in a breath through his aspirator. 'I don't know. I can't find anything like it anywhere else. And how does one follow up this Thousand Sons legionary's ramblings? I'd need to go to the flagship and speak with the Nightfall's archivists, but that's no guarantee of getting the truth.'

  'You suspect a cover-up?'

  Did he? Did he, honestly? 'I suspect something went on out there, something between the two primarchs, and they don't want any of the little people knowing about it. This legionary broke ranks and filed his report out of… I don't know. Vanity, perhaps. Superiority. Like he had something to prove.'

  Having Dita here was good. He was barely even talking to her now, but her presence let him work the problem through out loud, from another angle.

  And she knew it, too. She knew him well enough to know how he worked.

  'Sir?' she prompted.

  'I have the authority to investigate, but…'

  He let the words hang. Perdita didn't take them up in agreement, which he'd been hoping for.

  'And?' she asked. The woman was merciless when she wanted to be.

  'And I should. I need to. It's my duty.' Saying it out loud plascreted it into reality. 'It's my duty. I was hoping you'd talk me out of it. Maybe even suggesting the file could've got lost or corrupted along the way.'

  Perdita retightened her already immaculate ponytail. When she moved, Ulatal couldn't help but notice her brass rank insignia pins again, flashing as they reflected the light from the overhead lumes.

  'Would you listen to me if I tried to talk you out of it?' She looked him dead in the eyes. 'Honestly, sir?'

  He didn't reply, which was itself an answer.

  Perdita wasn't blind. Ulatal knew she recognised the threat of fixation in her commander's behaviour: the feverish need to see this through to the end. She'd seen it before. They all had, at one time or another - that need for a warrior to achieve something in the wake of going down in flames and crawling back up from the rubble.

  She gambled in the silence that followed. 'The Remembrancers have taken hold of pict-footage from the Juuvaur engagement.'

  Ulatal's throat worked. He tried and failed to swallow, hoping against hope he was keeping his emotions from his unshaven face. 'How?'

  'How does classified military intelligence always hit the public eye, sir? Someone leaked it.' She took a breath before speaking more. 'They're calling you a hero. 'They're writing poems about it, painting impressions… It's already spread to other fleets.'

  He snorted, resisting a pull on his aspirator. Let his last lung clench up. Let it shrivel in his scarred chest, for all that it mattered. Anything to stop Dita sensing the thrill of fearful discomfort snaking its way down Ulatal's spinal column.

  'Idiots,' he said.

  'Sir, no. No. You are a hero. That fight was…'

  She kept talking but Ulatal was no longer listening. He stared at her, his guts aching at the thought of all those ludicrous chroniclers and poets and artists watching him, watching his final mission, watching the fight itself, watching the way it ended in blood and choking smoke and shrieking engines and blood and burning iron and blood, so much blood and—

  Ulatal opened his eyes, unsure of just when he'd closed them. He limped back to his chair, hating the instinctive exhalation of relief when he took his weight off his abused hip. Perdita politely pretended not to notice.

  'It suits you,' Ulatal said at last.

  'Sir?'

  'My rank. You wear it well and we both knew it was coming. At least this way I didn't have to lose you to another squadron when they promoted you.'

  Perdita smiled. 'Is this the part where you tell me I'm the best pilot you've ever known and that you're ever so proud of me?'

  'Throne, no. I was the best. But you were a decent wingmate.'

  'You'll be back with us—'

  Ulatal raised a hand. 'Spare me the groxshit, please. My flying days are done, unless they rig up my next cockpit with a seat to counterbalance all the nausea from my broken skull, and an irrigation system to handle the fact I seem to crap blood now. Throne, half my organs are synthetic clone-copies that barely function. If they cybernetically replaced everything that was wrong with me, I'd be a servitor.' He showed his new metal teeth to illustrate the point.

  'Perhaps they'll give you a ship. A frigate to command.'

  He felt a moment of genuine horror filter into his ever-present irritation. 'I'm a starfighter pilot. I don't want a bloody ship, wallowing in the void with its fat arse hanging out.' Ulatal trailed off, hearing the petulance in his own voice. 'Although… a battleship, maybe? One o
f the big Glorianas. That might be fun.'

  Perdita laughed, and it was music to her former commander's ears. No charity or sympathy in that laugh. None in her eyes, either.

  'Aim high, sir,' she said with a grin. 'So, when do you leave?'

  Ulatal rocked in his restraint throne, doing his best not to grunt in pain each time the ship buckled around him. The first moment he'd felt the engines engage and shunt the vessel forwards, all of his injuries awoke at once, determined to punish him for taking this little trip. The supply transport pulled none of the high-grav manoeuvres he'd spent a life acclimating to in the cockpit of his Rage-pattern fighter, but it was still anything but a smooth ride. The cargo-hauler felt like it rattled its way through the warp, held together more by luck than by skilled piloting or a decent hull.

  Few military vessels were en route anywhere near where he needed to go. That meant he'd needed to be creative. Three weeks transit on a resupply carrier here, a month-long warp jump on a pilgrim ship there… Through a mix of decent planning and good fortune, Ulatal had managed to make it to the final leg of his journey.

  None of the ships had been much fun for his weakened constitution, but this one was the worst yet. At a particularly nasty shudder, his pained grunt melted into a teeth-clenching groan. Several of the other passengers cast a glance his way. He licked the acid taste of nausea off the back of his teeth and swallowed, too irritated to be embarrassed.

  Every time he breathed in, he inhaled the sweat-stink of the other passengers. Every time he moved, he felt their eyes on him. The uneasy glances were fine; he could take those as they came. It was the looks of pity that knifed at him. The sympathetic, half-scared gazes of lifelong civilians seeing a warrior brought low.

  Well, there was nothing he could do about it now, apart from not throwing up in front of them. He'd certainly not be marching in any victory parades any time soon.

  'Are you all right?'

  Ulatal lifted his head to the man in the restraint throne across the thoroughfare. He drew breath to reply, and managed three words before his breakfast rations and chunks of stomach lining blasted against the cage of his clenched teeth. Ulatal sagged against his restraint buckles, and when he moaned he painted the gantry floor with vomit. Groans and curses sounded out around him.