Spear of the Emperor - Aaron Dembski-Bowden Page 14

  ‘Control your ire, Arakanii,’ Tolmach said, and it had the weight of a command. The war-priests watched Morcant more intently now, their disapproval radiating in a cold aura. They had more authority than I’d initially realised; it was difficult to discern how the Spears’ druidic order really functioned. Each of them seemed to be some blend of Chaplain, Apothecary and Librarian.

  ‘Well, even the bastard Mentor would agree with me, if he had the right to speak. Wouldn’t you, false Scorpion?’

  At Morcant’s words, every head turned to Amadeus, standing nearby. He didn’t advance to be part of the inner circle, but stayed on the steps leading to the throne.

  ‘“For the righteous, ruthlessness is only a virtue when the gains outweigh the costs. When a commander’s ruthlessness is born of emotion or harms those they are charged to defend, it becomes tyranny.”’

  Morcant gave a humourless grunt. ‘Now he’s quoting the Codex at us. Emperor spare me.’

  ‘But he’s right.’ Brêac silenced his men with a chop of his hand. This was the Spears’ way, for their lords to listen to all counsel before making their decision: informal and tribal, just as on Nemeton. Every officer had a voice. No commander could ignore his men and keep their respect, but the final word belonged to their lord. ‘We’re the defenders of Elara’s Veil, my brothers. I won’t risk billions of lives for a shot at the Venatrix. Do any of you really want to be remembered as the warriors that damned a world for the chance of vengeance?’

  ‘I could live with it,’ Morcant replied.

  ‘You’re not going to have to,’ Brêac said, and that was the end of it.

  At the time, Brêac’s reluctance surprised me. The ­Mentor Legion’s archives were rich with lore pertaining to the merci­less decisions of Space Marine commanders across the centuries, and the hatred these warriors felt for the Venatrix was palpable even watching through my master’s eyes. So, yes, Brêac’s reluctance surprised me. So many tales of the Adeptus Astartes focus on the destruction of their foes at any cost. For countless Chapters, whose stubbornness was a legendary claim to valour, no price was too high to pay if it meant the annihilation of a foe.

  But I knew so little of the Spears, then. I didn’t know they had the lesson of the Pure burned into their brains. It had changed them. Forced them to feel a shred of compassion, if only for the sake of their souls. It’s said Space Marines know no fear, but the Spears feared becoming what they hated.

  ‘Hold course, Serivahn,’ Brêac ordered. ‘We’ll trust in the Emperor to guide our pursuit.’

  ‘The Emperor is a long way from here, lord,’ said Morcant, and that too had the feel of a familiar axiom. No one argued the point. Several of the Spears smiled grimly.

  After an excruciating wait to spare the people of Kouris from the daemonic overspill of a warp translation, we reached minimum safe distance. Still short of the Mande­ville point, we followed the Venatrix into the warp, trusting not only to the God-Emperor, but also to the Hex’s unready Navigator.

  3

  The Hex shuddered around us, and my senses were split between the bridge, where Amadeus was with the Spears, and our arsenal chamber, where we three helots were ­buckling ourselves into our armour. We tightened ­bindings, fixed cara­pace plates into place, sheathed and holstered weapons… My Engager shotgun was a heavy and welcome weight in my gloved hands after a week in the confines of the Damocles.

  And if I closed my left eye, my vision immediately transferred to Amadeus’ helmet lenses and his backpack-mounted targeting array. He was looking at the oculus, at the ectoplasmic hatred of the Sea of Souls trying to drown the ship. I opened my eye at once and suppressed the desire to spit. Saliva soaked my tongue, the forerunner to throwing up. It took three swallows to ease the urge.

  ‘Is this necessary?’ Tyberia asked as she buckled her helm into place.

  ‘The call was to battle stations,’ Kartash replied, ‘and if we catch the Venatrix, we’ll be ready for whatever our master commands.’

  ‘You think he’ll order us to board the enemy ship?’ I almost laughed. The very idea was madness.

  ‘And they won’t board us,’ Tyberia was adamant. ‘There are over fifty Spears aboard this ship. It would be suicide.’

  ‘We may not even catch them,’ said Kartash, with some reluctance. ‘Nevertheless, we will be ready.’

  The Hex continued to give chase. Warp flight without the guiding light of the Astronomican was a careening sprint along ducts and passages that thrashed amidst the seething madness of the Sea of Souls. For every moment the Hex caught traction and pushed forward under its own power, there was another spell of heaving, tormented iron as the ship fought the tides.

  We caught them, though. That was the problem. We caught up with the Venatrix far too fast.

  ‘There,’ said Brêac on the bridge. He violated the prohibitions regarding observation of the empyrean, as did most Space Marine warriors. He gazed into the murk of unreality on the oculus, and I could only guess at what wraiths from his past he saw in those burning waves. Through my master’s eyes, I saw colliding energies, the strange darkness of unlight, and…

  ‘I see it,’ Amadeus said. Through his eyes, I saw it, too: a silhouette in the ocean of psychic poison, a shadowy suggestion like a knife behind a curtain. ‘How can we have caught them this swiftly?’

  ‘Because they were waiting for us,’ Serivahn said, breathless, as he surged from his throne. Fury and something desperately close to fear ravaged his features. Everyone felt it in the same second. Across the bridge, weapons flashed into hands. Useless, so utterly useless, but a warrior’s instinct couldn’t always be tamed.

  ‘Incoming!’ one of the auspex servitors cried out in the same moment Serivahn yelled his orders.

  ‘Navigator, disengage, disengage! All hands, brace for–’

  XII

  ONE PERFECT MOMENT

  1

  There was one moment of pure stillness. A primeval, perfect peace. The apotheosis of silence.

  Every hand frozen, mid-curling into a fist.

  Every eye locked, unblinking, pupils dilated, in that moment horror becomes revelation.

  Every sword and axe flashing with the reflections of hellish light. In the steel of our bared weapons, you could see the faces of those that waited in the underworld, withered and bleeding and clawed to ribbons.

  The long dead and the recently slain, gazing into our world.

  And behind them, things that had never been born at all.

  They saw us. We saw them. Everything was silent. Everything was still.

  For one perfect moment.

  XIII

  BEHIND A BROKEN SHIELD

  1

  Tales of Geller field failure are the ghost stories of the void. Ships that never reach their destination are gently referred to as ‘lost with all hands in the Sea of Souls’, and we clutch at those delicate words, turning aside from thinking what they really mean. I have more experience with void travel than most humans could conceive, and I still know next to ­nothing of the warp. The dead dwell there in their multi­tudes. That I know. The dead, and daemons that feast on the living.

  I’ve boarded a ship that drifted back to reality after its ­Geller field failed. That was the mercantile runner Opportune, and I watched through Vadhán’s eyes as he swept the ship with a strike team of Spears, only to find its mangled iron bones sucked clean of life. The ship was a tomb, its hull and innards twisted beyond reckoning, let alone refit. When Vadhán withdrew his men, he ordered the Opportune destroyed. We prayed for the spirits of those lost in the Sea of Souls – a useless benediction, and all we could do.

  The ship had been in the warp, unshielded, for too long. There was nothing uncorrupt in her carcass, nothing left untainted that we could salvage, and no clue as to what had happened to her crew when the naked wrath of the warp flooded through her decks. So i
t became a legend, just another ghost story.

  But I was aboard the Hex when her Geller field failed.

  2

  Sound and motion came back to us in the same moment, flooring us with thunder. The ship screamed with sirens. The vox-system vomited static into every deck, loud enough to destroy all other sound.

  Around me, it was black. Absolutely, completely black. There was blood in my mouth. I was blind, deafened by the roar of the abused vox-speakers, and wounded. How badly wounded, I didn’t know. When I breathed in, I choked it back out a second later. The air was foul and too thick to pull into my throat. I remember thinking, with the fragile clarity of rising panic, that to breathe in again would kill me. The air tasted toxic. Then the heat hit: hot enough to strike like a physical blow – I was slippery with stinging sweat, my face streaming with it, attacking my eyes.

  Training took over. I needed my senses back. In the dark I fumbled with my helmet, needing to twist it straight before pulling the rebreather into place and slamming the visor down. Targeting data flared into existence, tracking helplessly over the blackness. I pulled in my first clean breath, forcing it to be deep, trying to take control of my racing heart by what I let into my lungs.

  A scream sounded over the helmet’s internal comm, one of anger as much as shock. Tyberia. A flicker-flash of gunfire followed it, somewhere to my left. It illuminated my surroundings just enough to turn the air from black to grey, orienting me, restoring a hint of what was up and what was down. I was already cycling through vision overlays, pulling myself to my feet. I’d not known until then that I was down on the deck.

  ‘Tyberia?’ I voxed to her. My voice was a strangled choke. ‘Report.’

  Nothing.

  ‘Tyberia? Kartash? Amadeus?’

  Again, nothing.

  The thermal-optic feed was a migraine smear of burning light. Monochrome thermal imaging fared better in piercing the murk, turning the absolute blackness into dark mist. Heat warnings sang in my ears until I muted them to pulsing runes on my visor. My rebreather filtered the air but did nothing for the heat. I was sucking in slow gulps of what felt like promethium jet wash.

  I fumbled again. My shoulder light finally woke up, spitting out a thin beam that achieved little beyond showing the swirling particles of filth in the air.

  Smoke. It was smoke. The Hex was on fire.

  Shapes resolved in the ashy mist. Walls that flickered and danced like water, fading in and out of sight. The deck was clearer; the smoke was thinner closer to the gantry flooring. Our arming chamber swam in and out of focus around me; a room that I’d lived in for months on the way to Kouris lost all familiarity in the obscuring smoke. I moved forward, weighed down by armour that had never felt so heavy, and smashed my shins on one of our clothing chests. I’d thought I was close to the door. I was actually on the far side of the chamber.

  Tyberia cried out again, this time with nothing but anger. I couldn’t see her, and even the muzzle flash was gone now, but I heard the throaty roar of an Engager discharging over our intra-squad comm. After it, I caught the crunch of her pump-action reload.

  Something leered at me from the smoke and I thank the Emperor all these years later that it wasn’t one of my companions, because with my blood up, I turned and fired the second I saw it move. I never learned what it was. Something spectral and amorphous. Something that burst into a shower of steaming blood as it dissolved back into the smoke.

  I could barely see my monitron bracer in front of my face. I hammered my gloved thumb on the keyplate, sending swift-burst code across the intra-squad link.

  ‘Anuradha?’ It was Tyberia, answering at once. She emerged from the smoke, not as the monster had done, but with halting, searching strides. Her Engager was held high, stock against her shoulder, with the muzzle lowered to prevent the kind of fear-firing I’d just unleashed myself.

  We were face to face and could still barely see each other. Mercifully, the shipwide vox finally ceased its unmanned static screech. Less mercifully, there was a momentary blast of delighted, soft laughter before it cut off completely.

  ‘Was that… Was that a child?’ Tyberia asked.

  Maybe, or something pretending to be one. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. ‘We have to get the bridge. What were you firing at?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her face was hidden behind her rebreather and visor, but her voice caught on the words. If her heart was hammering even half the speed of mine, I knew why. Adrenal­ine. Fear. Disorientation. A heady mix in our bloodstreams.

  We moved together, always within arm’s reach, Engagers swinging to cover the endless shadows we stalked through. I’d trained to fight in burning buildings, but to be ­stumbling through the inferno that devoured the Hex was beyond any controlled fire I’d fought through before. Before my ­training, I’d thought that fire would cast everything into stark light, blazing around me. The opposite was true. In a fire, you can’t see anything. The familiar becomes alien and almost impossible to perceive. The smoke is almost impenetrable. There’s no right answer between too much caution or too much haste. If you linger too long in one place, you’ll find yourself trapped by the flames, but if you move with speed, you’ll lose your bearings with pathetic ease in the blackness. Either way, you’re dead if you’re not lucky as well as careful.

  We advanced down the corridor, crouched low. I led the way, Tyberia moved at my shoulder, constantly swinging back to check the way we’d come. Time ceased to have any meaning in those dark halls. For all the enhancements to my memory, I can’t recall how long we moved together, a two-thrall strike team, lost in the Hex’s guts. Gunfire rattled above us, behind us, beneath us… Other crew members on other decks, fighting for their lives against who knew what.

  The smoke thinned enough for us to get our bearings, but it never really cleared. It lengthened every shadow and cast half of every corridor into night. At one point, the hallway floor became treacherous underfoot, sucking at our boots. When I looked down, we were ankle-deep in viscous brown slime. It stirred as we sloshed through it, sticky as animal slurry.

  ‘Oh, God-Emperor,’ Tyberia breathed. ‘Oh, shitting hell. Have you scanned this?’

  I didn’t need to scan it. My boot had just bumped a partially articulated ribcage, coated in the slime. I knew what we were walking through. I just didn’t know who it had been. At least two dozen of the crew, maybe closer to fifty.

  When I raised my head, my shoulder spotlight followed the motion.

  ‘Don’t look up,’ I voxed to Tyberia. ‘Just move.’

  But of course she looked up, and I couldn’t move despite ordering her to. We both stared at the corridor’s ceiling, just like the walls and deck, covered in blast patterns of gore. A family of wet, red skeletons were fused with the metal of the ship. Several of them were still moving, jaws opening and closing on skinned tendons, dripping fingers reaching for us.

  Our Engagers roared.

  When we reloaded farther down the corridor, both spattered with the blood of dead crew, a new voice reached me through the background static of our squad’s vox.

  ‘Helot Secundus.’

  ‘Master…? Master, is that you?’

  His reply was lost in static. I resisted the urge to curse down the vox. ‘Master, please repeat. Heavy interference. I’ve lost my connection to your senses.’

  ‘Anuradha.’ His voice was a crackle of syllables. ‘My instruments have failed. Report your location.’

  I did so, and Amadeus commanded us to make our way to the third ascension concourse where he would meet us with several Spears. When he asked if we’d found the Helot Primus, I could only pray that Kartash hadn’t been in the last corridor.

  ‘Master, what happened?’

  ‘The Geller field collapsed before we broke back into real space. The Venatrix launched some kind of psychic mine.’ I could hear the bark of Amadeus’ bolter behin
d his words. I could also hear screaming that couldn’t possibly be coming from a human throat. It fell silent after another three bolt detonations. ‘The ship was exposed to the Sea of Souls for exactly one point three-five seconds,’ my master continued. ‘Half of the Hex is aflame. Many more decks are flooded by manifestations from the immaterium. Additionally, the Venatrix has followed us back into the void.’

  I felt no tremors of weapons fire around us. ‘Is she engaging us?’

  ‘No. She is boarding us. Do as you were ordered and reach the concourse – we have to repel the Pure.’

  ‘We’re almost there, master.’ I kept my voice from shaking. ‘Two minutes, no more.’

  ‘Acknowledged, Helot Secundus.’ And then from nowhere, he added, ‘Be careful.’

  I led Tyberia as we ran, heading down one of the ship’s long spinal thoroughfares, grateful for the dissipating smoke. My heart was beating fit to burst, my body stinging from adrenaline. I could hear Tyberia experiencing the same thing; her breath sawed over the vox, into my ears. We ascended a spiral staircase, then crossed a landing at a dead sprint. No bodies anywhere. That, at least, boded well. The heat was still oppressive enough to leave my senses swimming, but mercifully the fires were lessened here.

  We rounded the corner at the next junction, and through the wispy smoke, we saw Amadeus at the far end of the corridor. His towering silhouette filled the hallway, and even with all detail lost in the ashen mist, the sight of him fuelled me with relief. The intensity of that emotion almost made me forget myself and greet him with laughter.

  Amadeus stood amidst several downed bodies, the shadows at his feet human in scale, writhing and crawling. With idle brutality, he aimed his boltgun down at one of the crawling men and fired. The shell burst the body apart. Gore flowered in the air. Then he placed his boot on the back of a second crawling figure, pinning it in place for a ­second execution.