The Omnibus - John French Read online

  Ahriman turned to leave, feeling the bound daemon’s hunger still chewing at his mental defences. He would have to do what he had hoped to avoid more than anything else. As he stepped from the chamber, the daemon-husk hissed to itself and watched the door as it closed.

  Blackness surrounded the dead station. Astraeos watched its shape resolve bit by bit, like an ancient wreck revealed by a beam of light in the ocean depths. Starlight, weak and curdled to the colour of pus, caught the edges of the station’s bulk and snagged on its spires. It was an irregular half-sphere, towers and domes covering its flat upper surface while masts and sensor blisters hung in thick forests from its curved underbelly.

  Astraeos blinked rapidly and the image became a single window at the corner of his helmet display. The gunmetal cave of the craft’s troop compartment filled his eyes. To his right the loading ramp hung open, the shuffling shapes of servitors clacking across the deck as they performed final checks. To his left, more void-suited servitors sat in silent rows on either side of the dull metal chests that filled the compartment’s floor. Kadin and Thidias sat across from him. The eyes of their helmets looked at him but he knew they were watching the image of the dead station.

  It had taken them weeks to get out here. Swaddled in his amniotic cocoon, Egion the Navigator had ridden the Titan Child to the edge of the Eye, its Geller field envelope creaking like a sail in a high wind. Now they waited in the guts of their one remaining gunship and watched the feed from the Titan Child’s sensors. He looked at his two brothers; there was an unseeing, stiff quality about them, as if they were empty armour. He had not told them why they had come to this scrap of dead space, of course. Ahriman had told Astraeos when they broke from the warp, but Astraeos had said nothing to Kadin or Thidias.

  Is that because of how you think they could react, said the doubting voice in his head, or because if you say it out loud it will become true? He remembered Cadar hanging in a web of chains, a daemon grinning from his empty eyes. This is how it begins. One lie grown on another until you cannot remember the truth. But still he said nothing.

  He flicked his eye back to the waiting image of the station and blinked; it filled his view again. Tens of thousands of souls had once dwelled here, but they were long dead and the derelict hulk was silent, dark and cold. It was difficult to judge its size from an image but the numbers and scales that twitched at the edges of the screen told him that the station was over fifty kilometres in diameter. In comparison, the Titan Child was like a fish drifting towards the corpse of a leviathan. They were approaching the station on minimal power. Linked to her ship, Mistress Carmenta was holding the ship’s power in reserve, poised to be diverted to speed or weapons fire, if needed. Watching the station draw closer, Astraeos could not shake the feeling that they were intruders into the realm of a sleeping beast.

  ‘It is deserted?’ said Kadin over the vox.

  ‘So it seems,’ said Astraeos, keeping his eyes on the luminous image of the station.

  ‘It was Imperial,’ said Thidias, quietly, from just beside Astraeos. ‘And it died by force; look at the plasma burns on the lower sections.’ Astraeos had already noticed the characteristic blistering and smooth ripple burns on some of the station’s armour. Ship-killing plasma weaponry had fired on the station, and there were other signs: tumbled and broken towers, ragged holes that must have been at least a hundred metres wide, still clouds of debris that caught the starlight like crystal sand. Astraeos did not need the battle signs to know that the station was a dead shell; he knew it with a leaden certainty he could not explain.

  ‘Something of this size must have taken some killing,’ said Thidias. ‘Defence batteries, shield generators, it has enough to hold off a battleship.’

  ‘Not enough, though,’ growled Kadin, and turned away from the image on the screen to look at Astraeos. ‘Why have we come here?’

  ‘It was an astropathic relay station,’ said Astraeos. His eyes had fixed on a statue that rose from the back of the station: an angel, its wings spread against the stars, its hands reaching into the darkness. Its bronze skin was uncorroded, its form whole. But it was the face that drew his gaze. Someone had bored its eyes out with plasma blasts. Without thinking, Astraeos brought his hand up to the eyepiece above his own lost eye. ‘Hundreds of astropaths sifted the immaterium here, catching messages and spitting them back out. Then the Eye swelled and swallowed it.’

  ‘Why seek such a place?’ said Kadin, his voice thick with contempt. ‘And how did he know it was here?’

  ‘Because I helped destroy it.’ Ahriman walked up the ramp and ducked into the gunship’s compartment. His armour was still the same battered plate he had worn serving the Harrowing, but now it was blue. The old battle damage was still visible beneath the fresh lacquering. A tabard of pale fabric hung from his torso, and his face was bare, the ambient light of the gunship’s hold darkening his smooth skin to the hue of polished wood. ‘I was here when this place died. I saw its crew killed and its astropaths burned alive in pyres.’ He paused and looked at Kadin. ‘Their screams still hang in the warp here. All those messages and minds wore the barrier between worlds thin.’

  ‘Is that why we came here?’ spat Kadin, and Astraeos could feel the aggression fuming from his brother.

  ‘It is also a long way from anything else,’ said Ahriman, his voice calm. Astraeos could feel control radiating from Ahriman like cold from frosted steel. He sat beside Astraeos and locked a mag-harness around his torso. With a wheeze of pistons and pressuring air the loading ramp began to close. The frame of the gunship began to shiver as its engines caught.

  ‘Why?’ said Kadin, his voice low but loaded within soft aggression.

  ‘Because of what I must do.’

  Carmenta watched the gunship slip from her flank. Somewhere she breathed and twitched in her cradle of cables.

  No, she thought, not my flank, the ship’s flank. The shuttle was exiting from the Titan Child, its engines brightening as it built speed. I have to keep the separation, even if it is only for a few hours. I have to rest, but not yet. Ahriman had said that they had to be ready: ready to leave, ready to fight, ready for something that he had not wanted to tell her. After the encounter at the black moon, it was an understandable request, but she had stayed linked to the ship for weeks without pause, and the link had begun to take its toll.

  After the exhilaration of battle and sudden flight had come the iron-flavoured feeling of exhaustion. It was in those moments that she was weakest, and when she was weak, the Titan Child slipped deeper into her thoughts. She had woken from dreams as they scudded through the warp, unable to remember who or where she was. Whispered thoughts of weaponry and sensations of clicking machinery filled her even when her memory returned. Worse were the moments when she had been deep within the sensations of the ship only to find her mind dumped back into her body. She would lie in the tangle of interface cables, unable to move, panic washing through her until her body reconnected to her mind. She needed her link to her ship, but at times she loathed it, like a drunk grown tired of drunkenness.

  She had no time to rest, though, not now.

  She watched the gunship as its flight curved under the station’s belly. Somewhere, on the edge of her perception, her fingers twitched. She scanned the station again with auspex and deep penetration augurs. She raked across its scarred surfaces, listening with multi-spectrum aerials. No movement, no heat signs; just pockets of air trapped in the superstructure, like bubbles trapped in a sunken wreck. The station was a corpse, an empty shell. It made her want to run, to light her engines and dive back into the blackness. She began her slow orbits of the station, her sensors twitching between it and the void. Somewhere, in the body she half forgot she had, she was shivering.

  The gunship slid into the station through a ragged hole in its underbelly. Bright white lights stabbed out from the small vessel’s nose and wings. Blackened girders and tangled metal threw shadows into the cavernous space beyond. The gunship glided for
wards, the weapon pods in its chin and flanks twitching as they searched for targets. The space had once been a series of holds and stores, but explosions had gouged it to greater dimensions, breaking through floors and walls to create a vast cavern.

  In the gunship’s belly, Ahriman sat in silence. Tolbek’s sword rested across his knees, his helm’s red eyes staring at nothing. In his freshly lacquered plate and helm, he was a statue. The warp was quiet, like still water around a half-submerged wreck. That quiet did nothing to reassure him.

  Ahriman let his mind reach out into the dead space that clung to the station’s bones, probing gently, feeling the tatters of reality slide over his senses. Memories coated in blood and wrapped in screams surfaced in his mind. He had been on the station decades before when the Brotherhood of Darkness had stripped it of life. What they had left was a torn layer of scar tissue over a deep wound. The warp was still, but only in the way ice was still before it cracked.

  He pulled his senses back into his immediate surroundings. Residual images and sensations prickled the surface of his thoughts. He blinked and flicked his eyes over the hold. He had not enabled his armour’s enhanced vision and the only light was from Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin’s eyepieces, which glowed like coals in the gloom. He and the three other Space Marines sat closest to the hold’s ramp. Further in, and filling the rest of the hold, were the servitors. They sat along both walls, their bulbous helms lolling and shaking as the gunship manoeuvred. They would not move until commanded. A memory of the hand of the Rubricae closing around his wrist rose in his thoughts and then sank again.

  ‘Landing area identified,’ came the vox-flat voice of the pilot servitor.

  ‘Very well,’ said Ahriman. ‘Set us down.’

  ‘By your will,’ replied the servitor. The whine of thrusters rose in intensity, as the gunship slipped through a web of girders to settle on the torn remains of a platform. There was a thump as its landing feet magnetically locked to the deck.

  Kadin had already opened his mag-harness, his bolter ready in his hands. The inter-armour comms were silent, but Ahriman could hear the words of Kadin’s battle oath in his mind like a whispered prayer. Sat beside his brother, Thidias was still, his thoughts a steady beat of battle focus. Astraeos shifted and glanced at Ahriman.

  Ahriman stood and moved to the assault ramp, his sword held ready in his hands. Astraeos rose, his own blade loose by his side.

  ‘Will you tell us now what you expect?’ said Kadin.

  ‘I am not certain,’ said Ahriman. He felt the stab of contempt in Kadin’s thoughts, but said nothing.

  The high-pitched whine of the engines still shook the gunship as the pilot servitor held it poised to boost away at the slightest sign of trouble. Pistons pushed the hatch wide and the gunship’s air hissed into the darkness outside. Ahriman’s helmet display flickered to life, turning his world into night-piercing monochrome. Hard vacuum and gravity warning runes pulsed red at the edge of his sight. Threat markers glowed in unresolved amber. He stepped from the hatch and felt the magnetised sole of his foot clamp on to the platform. He began to walk, his feet locking and releasing with each step. For a moment, it felt as if it were his armour walking, not him, as if he were a passive watcher inside. He shook his head and saw Astraeos was already moving past him, heading towards where the wide platform met the cavern’s wall. Kadin and Thidias overtook him and spread to either side, their heads moving to scan the cavern. Ahriman followed.

  ‘All quiet,’ said Thidias, and a popping screech of static filled Ahriman’s ear. He had reached the wall that edged the platform like a cliff rising above a strip of tidal sand, and he stopped and looked back to where the gunship sat. Hard white beams of light still stabbed from its chin and wings, but the airless dark of the cavern seemed to swallow their brightness.

  ‘Unload,’ he said on a closed channel. Another wail of distortion answered him. For a second, he wondered if they had heard him, then the servitors began to march down the gunship’s ramp. They moved in lumbering lockstep, their faces hidden by thick brass domes, their bodies clad in vulcanised rubber. Between them they bore the grey metal chests.

  ‘I have found a door,’ said Astraeos, his voice chopped by static. Ahriman turned his head and waited for Astraeos’s locator marker to settle in his vision.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Ahriman, and he began to move towards Astraeos’s marker. He found the Librarian on one knee, watching an opening in the cavern wall. The door was as tall as a super-heavy tank flipped on its end, a black gulf edged by the teeth of the blast doors pulled back into its frame.

  ‘I do not like it,’ said Kadin as he came up behind them. He too was looking up at the waiting doorway, his bolter tracking his eyes. ‘No energy readings, no life or movement signs, it’s like it was scooped out.’ He turned his head and looked at Ahriman. ‘What did you do to this place?’

  ‘They…’ began Ahriman and then paused. He had been there, he had helped. It was not his design, but he had had a hand in its completion. He thought of the Brotherhood of Darkness, the runes glowing on their midnight armour as they lowered the astropaths into the pyre on chains. They had screamed and screamed until their tongues charred in their mouths. Fat had dribbled off them as they burned. There had been shapes in the fire, shapes which pulled the burning psykers down into the embers. There had been hundreds of astropaths on the station and the pyre had burned for days. The Brotherhood of Darkness had watched from the shadows, their armour glistening with dried blood, whispering their prayers to the night, and Ahriman had stood amongst them.

  Think what you were and how far you have fallen, said a voice in the back of his thoughts; and for a moment, he thought he heard the rustle of crows’ wings.

  Ahriman shook his head and looked away from Kadin. He let his mind slide along the angles of the wall and through the doorway. His senses stretched across metal and airless space, flowing down lightless passages and tasting the pockets of stale air trapped behind sealed doors. It felt cold, as if he were swimming through black water under a crust of ice. His mind shivered. It was so easy, like running one’s hand through fine sand, or smelling wood smoke on a winter wind.

  The darkness pressed against his thoughts; every inch of the station was bare of the smeared colours left by life, emotion and thought. He paused. Had he been wrong; was this place not what he thought after all? There was only one way to be certain. He let his mind dip just below the level of the real and opened his senses to the dimension beyond –

  – a jungle of colour and light, splitting, re-forming, refracting and battering against eyes he did not have.

  Heat, the smell of excreta, roses, a feather caress.

  Shapes tumbling one over another, like oil mixing with blood and boiling gold.

  A shape looked up at him with a pair of eyes the colour of amber and a chuckle spread across a face that formed as it grew. It laughed. There were more faces and a thousand eyes staring at him.

  There were hands. Pale, soft hands pawing at black, enfolding liquid.

  The stink of ash and urine, the cold of ice and the stickiness of drying blood –

  Air gasped into Ahriman’s lungs. He could feel sweat beading on his skin. For a second, he could see a lingering after-image, a luminous imprint of juddering hands reaching from a springing vortex of colour. He tried to move but felt his armour resist, and for an instant he felt panic. He was dead in his armour, trapped in its iron grasp, forever falling, forever drowning. Like his Legion, like the brothers he had destroyed.

  ‘Ahriman.’ Astraeos’s voice filled his ear, urgent and raw.

  Ahriman tried to move and this time his armour unlocked as he tensed against it. His vision cleared. Biorhythm warning icons glowed cold blue in his eyes. He had passed out and his armour had locked around him, holding him unmoving. He turned his head. Thick hoar frost covered the platform around him, crawling up the cavern wall and doorway.

  Astraeos stood five paces from Ahriman, his sword drawn.
Green light clung to the sword’s edge and haloed his head. Thidias and Kadin stood further away, but both had their bolters levelled. Ahriman shook his head again. His throat was dry and his voice cracked when he spoke.

  ‘How long?’ he said, hearing his words echo in his helm, and the vox scratch and pop in his ear. Thidias glanced at Astraeos. Slowly the Librarian lowered his sword and the light soaked back into the blade. Beside him, Thidias let the muzzle of his bolter point down to the floor. Kadin did not move.

  ‘Two seconds. I felt it,’ said Astraeos. Clicking static filled the pause. ‘Whatever you did, I felt it.’ Ahriman nodded, but said nothing.

  He had intended to taste the warp; instead his mind had broken through the veil of reality. Transiting one’s mind to the warp was a delicate matter; it demanded ritual, and care. It should not have been that easy, he thought. He had simply punched through. He remembered the power flooding through him when he had faced Tolbek, the raw joy of it, the ease of power unlike anything he had felt before. But, even here, it should not have been so easy.

  Slowly, he took a step towards the door. His muscles were shaking; a taste of burned sugar and soured milk was still on his tongue. He extended his mind again, probing at the warp around them, letting it drift just ahead of his steps. He felt his senses want to leap ahead, to soar in the warp-thinned reality, but that was dangerous in a place like this. Any use of power without fine balance and control was a risk. He should have known that, and for a second he wondered why he had allowed himself to slip before.

  The procession of servitors closed in behind them, their magnetised steps sending a tremor through the platform. Ahriman looked back to where Astraeos and his two brothers watched.

  ‘Follow,’ he said, and stepped across the doorway. Behind him Astraeos glanced at his two brothers and followed into the dark.

  Kadin watched Ahriman as they walked through the station’s silent passages. The sorcerer could kill, Kadin had seen that truth, but he moved like a lord rather than a warrior. Kadin had seen it before, an arrogance that ran so deep it bled from words and gestures. It was the mark of one who would destroy anything, and break oaths for truths that only they could see. Kadin had seen his Chapter burn at the hands of such men. Now he was oathbound to ideals that might see him dead.