The Omnibus - John French Read online

  The memory vanished.

  I am losing control, she thought.

  ‘It’s here,’ shouted Egion, over the link. She could almost see him twisting in his amniotic tank, defecating and bleeding in panic. ‘It is here, we must run. Run.’

  ‘No. We must…’

  ‘We must run,’ he shouted, and as he shouted his voice carried the vision of his fear into her mind.

  She saw what he had seen. It was like seeing a reflection caught in rippling water, all form and pattern breaking as soon as it was seen. She could see beyond the grey lines of the station, behind the stars. Shapes moved there, huge and protean. Scales and scabs of colour clung to their bulk. They waited, their hunger barely restrained.

  Carmenta shrieked as a machine. Throughout the Titan Child power conduits ruptured, spilling gas and burning fuel into her insides. The plasma reactors faded and surged. She felt her own body twist in the cradle of cables. Her engines were still burning, but she was numb to them. She was losing her grip on her Titan Child. Her hull was shaking, trembling like skin exposed to an icy wind. Egion’s terror was flooding her with human fear and the ship was trying to shake her free. She had to cut the interface with Egion, or he would destroy them.

  She forced her mind back into the link. Her mind became the Titan Child again, ramming through her systems, trailing code damage and corrupt routines. She grasped the mind-impulse link and, in that instant, she saw him.

  He floated in his amniotic tank, churning it to froth with his vestigial limbs. Ribbons of fresh blood stained the fluid. Feed and waste tubes had ripped from the sockets in his mouth and back. His head seemed grotesquely large atop his shrunken torso, his eyes milk-white with blindness, his mouth stapled shut. The open eye on his forehead twitched wildly at the view beyond the crystal walls of the chamber.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  She shut down the link and the vision of the Navigator’s chamber vanished. The slow beats of her plasma-filled heart pulsed through her as she hung silent in the void. Then the Titan Child’s engines roared to life. Fire ran through her veins, and she wanted to run, to run and not look back. But she turned towards the dead station.

  ‘Ahriman,’ she shouted in an electronic cry.

  Ahriman did not run. The chamber’s stone walls and pillared tiers were melting. In front of him, the daemon arched its back and vomited a great wash of black liquid into the air. The sword impaling the daemon began to glow with heat. Astraeos staggered backwards, his palms smoking. The daemon quivered, scattering burning droplets of blood as its body dissolved into a boneless pool of flesh. More daemons stepped from shadows like congealing smoke. Bodies of wasted muscle and cracked skin clawed out of the gloom. Ahriman glimpsed white eyes, claws, and rows of hooked teeth in mucus-thick jaws.

  Exhaustion bubbled up inside Ahriman. Black circles popped at the edge of his eyes. Hoots and chitters scratched at his thoughts. He felt as if he were falling down a lightless shaft. He took a step backwards. His muscles ached as if he had been fighting for weeks without rest.

  A daemon stepped from the growing throng. It had a long, vulpine head, and its skin was taut over a hunched body of lean muscle. It took a slow step, its black eyes flicking over Astraeos and Ahriman. Ahriman saw its legs tense. The daemon jumped. Behind it, the rest of its kin came forwards in a single wave. Astraeos began to turn to face the leaping daemon, but too slowly. The daemon’s claws touched his shoulder guard just before it was about to land.

  +Down,+ shouted Ahriman. Astraeos dived to the floor. The telekinetic wave hit the daemon while it was still in mid-air and flung it back in a spray of black slime. The charging daemons faltered, and Ahriman ran forwards and pulled Astraeos to his feet in the instant before they rallied and came on again. Bright light danced in front of his eyes and his skin felt clammy. The circle of daemons closed over them before they could take a step. Ahriman heard claws scrabble at his armour. Teeth and eyes filled his vision. Rancid breath fogged his eyepieces. He felt something sharp slip through a joint in his leg armour. Armour integrity warnings lit in his helmet display.

  +Astraeos,+ he called, and reached for the Librarian’s mind. He felt Astraeos’s mind resist for an instant, and then open. Their wills became one, and Ahriman felt his fatigue fall away. He formed a single, blunt thought and heard its echo in Astraeos’s mind.

  The dome of force exploded outwards. Daemons ripped from the floor and tumbled through the air. Fragments of pottery, metal and bone rose in a scattered cloud. A moment of perfect, still calm flowed through Ahriman. He could feel every mote of dust and scrap of debris caught on the edge of the expanding telekinetic sphere. He changed the shape of his thought and Astraeos followed. The debris exploded outwards in a wave of shrapnel. The daemons caught in the blast fell in shredded heaps. The way was open to the door out of the chamber.

  The calm had vanished from Ahriman as suddenly as it had come. He felt Astraeos’s mind buckle. Voids opened in his own will. They ran for the door.

  The daemons followed, pouring into the passage opening like a swarm of insects. Frost ran down the walls in front of them. Cracks opened in the plated metal, glowing with a blue light. Ahriman tumbled end over end, his mag-grip on the floor broken. He reached out blindly, felt his hand hit something solid and grabbed on. His body spun around his grip and slammed into a hard surface. Force juddered through him, and the air left his lungs. He could not tell if he was holding on to the wall, ceiling or floor. Confused runes swam across his eyes. He twisted around, trying to find the direction in which they had been running. Silence filled his skull. He could feel blood hammering in his ears. Something hit his arm, and he twisted to bring his sword around. Astraeos’s eyepieces were inches away from Ahriman’s faceplate. The Librarian had clamped on to the passage wall.

  +Which way?+ sent Ahriman, but Astraeos was reaching past him, pointing.

  No, realised Ahriman. Not pointing. Aiming.

  The bolt pistol fired. A jet of silent flame spat over Ahriman’s shoulder. Ahriman spun around, still holding himself in place with his right hand. The bolt-round’s detonation lit the darkness for a second. A living wall of mouths and reaching claws filled the passage behind them. Ahriman pulled his sword around and closed his eyes. He burrowed deep into his being, calling on reserves of focus he had kept sealed for so long he had almost forgotten them.

  +Burn,+ he sent, and the fire leapt from the blade tip. It shone blue with heat. Ahriman’s mind went with the fire, riding its fury and guiding its path. It struck a daemon with a halo of waving arms, and burned straight through it. He swept the fire around, cutting through the daemons in a brilliant arc. Some of the daemons split into two smaller bodies which floated for a second in the death-slime of their parent before swimming forwards. Others burst apart in explosions of multi-coloured steam.

  Ahriman was shivering, his skin clammy and wet with sweat inside his armour. The formulaic patterns in his mind were burning, tainting his senses. He could smell smoke, and feel heat prickle his lungs. Somewhere beside him, Astraeos had stopped firing.

  They had to move. He released his hold on the flame. It did not end. The fire still coursed from his sword tip, ripping through his mind and body. He could not stop it; he could not release the power he had called. In his mind the burning pattern glowed brighter and brighter, becoming more complex, sucking in thoughts and sensations like a hurricane wind. The hand holding the sword began to glow. Pain lanced from his fingers, but he could not open them; he could do nothing but watch as fire boiled out of the cracks of his soul. His skin blistered. There was just fire roaring in his mind. He could not stop. He could not remember how it had begun.

  I am Ahzek Ahriman, came a voice from the depths of his mind. It was an old voice, forgotten and rejected.

  No, he screamed in a thought that was charring to nothing. No, I am not. He failed. The dream failed, and I fell.

  The power vanished, soaking back into his mind. He opened his eyes. The lance of heat still linge
red as a smear of neon light hanging in the vacuum, cooling and fading from blue to purple. The distant door to the choral chamber was still visible, edged by a pulsing blood-red glow. Globules of slime and skin spun in the half-darkness. As he watched, pink amorphous shapes began to form from the vaporised slime. He could see sucker-tipped fingers flexing as they extruded from the congealing matter.

  Ahriman turned to look for Astraeos. The Librarian was already flying down the passage, kicking off walls, floor and ceiling. Ahriman started to follow. A beam of actinic light fizzed past him and melted a hole in the passage wall. He turned as a daemon hooted and flicked another beam of light from its fingers. The daemon was crawling across the buckled floor-grating. A wide mouth split the face in the centre of its torso, a thick tongue slavering over teeth. Blue and yellow flames were licking its skin and lighting the hunger in its saucer eyes. Its six limbs moved with boneless speed as it scrambled closer.

  Ahriman spread his mind into the passage walls. Sweat instantly sheeted his skin, and then froze in hard droplets. His body floated to the centre of the passage, cradled in a telekinetic web. Pressure built like a tightening bowstring. The metal of the walls began to buckle. He felt as if the noon sun were blazing in his skull. In front of him, Astraeos was spinning as he shoved away from the roof. He folded his mind around the Librarian. Astraeos resisted, shoving back with a panicked wave of will. Ahriman felt the pain in his head increase.

  +Submit,+ screamed Ahriman, and felt the resistance drop away. He released the force of his mind, as a daemon reached for him with a flame-wreathed hand. Ahriman and Astraeos shot forwards like arrows loosed from a bow. The tunnel ripped apart in their wake. The star of pain in Ahriman’s head exploded. Shreds of metal scattered before them, half melting or dissolving into grey dust as they flew into the waiting dark.

  The Titan Child rolled and skidded as Carmenta felt thrusters fire too hard. Opposing forces shook through her bones, and she screamed in pain. Coolant was venting into her holds, oil spraying from ruptured pipes, her corridors filling with acidic gas and steam. Bulkheads snapped shut, and she felt parts of the ship go numb. The Titan Child kept skidding. The iron cliff of the station’s flank loomed out of the static of her sensors, so close she felt she could touch it. Then her sensors cut out and plunged her into blindness.

  No, no, no, she thought, no, not like this, not blind. She was alone and could feel nothing. No, not like this. I am not flesh. Only flesh dies. I am metal, I am data, and machine. I am Titan Child.

  Her machine eyes opened again as data punched back into her mind. She was in time to see something pull itself from the station.

  A hundred-metre-wide sheet of metal cracked from the station’s back and lifted up like the carapace of a vast turtle rising from mud. Tendrils of lurid energy trailed from it as it emerged. Under its shell, the creature had limbs of wreckage, pincers of twisted metal, and fins of torn steel. A blunt head formed from twisted gun turrets turned and looked at the Titan Child. Its eyes were gouged holes that wept molten metal. Carmenta looked back at it and felt the promise of ruin in the creature’s gaze.

  The creature roared, an impossible sound that rang across the void. Carmenta fired. Plasma batteries and turbolasers lit the narrow gulf between her and the station. The creature leapt. Debris spun behind it, sparkling like snowfall under starlight. Wings of crumpled metal unfolded from under its shell. Carmenta could not process what was happening. She had missed. The creature was accelerating towards her.

  No, it was flying in the airless void. The buzzing beat of its wings flooded her sensors. She readied to fire again, feeling the thrum of charging capacitors and vibration as breeches closed on macro-shells.

  With a shower of void-pitted metal, another creature broke through the back of the station and leapt into the void, then another, and another.

  Carmenta fired. The creatures vanished as plasma-tipped shells exploded in a spread of overlapping fire-spheres. The release of each shot was hot, filled with a scream of molten fury.

  The creatures came through the inferno, red with heat, mouths wide. Carmenta felt cold, the cold of dead iron spinning through an endless night. She fired once more before the wave of burning creatures passed through her shields and sank their claws into her hull.

  Ahriman’s mind buckled as his thoughts slurred. They were tumbling now rather than flying through the station, banging off walls, floors and ceilings. Ahriman’s helmet display cut out, returned and cut out again. He could hear air hissing from rents in his armour. He had no idea how much further they had to go, or even if he had guided them back the way they had come.

  The frame of an open blast door slammed into his helm. Sparks ignited behind his eyes. Part of his awareness fell away, as a portion of his brain blacked out. He hurtled on unguided, momentum spinning him on as his telekinetic projection died.

  Astraeos caught him, grabbing him as he tumbled past. The Librarian had clamped his boots to a wall and reached out to hook Ahriman’s arm. He tried to speak, but his teeth were loose in his mouth and his tongue was thick with blood. A sickly luminous haze crept across his vision.

  +Which way?+ sent Astraeos. Ahriman tried to answer, then shook his head. Astraeos pulled him closer, his face looming in Ahriman’s blurred vision. +Which way should we take?+ sent Astraeos again. Ahriman tried to understand what the Librarian meant. +They are coming.+

  Ahriman turned his head, and tried to focus through the fog of colour and popping stars of light. Three doorways looked back at him, three blank openings leading to darkness. They had come this way; of course. Or had they? His thoughts flowed like treacle. He could not remember and he could not have been sure which door led to the gunship even if he had. Astraeos was shaking him harder and harder. He moved his hand to push him away, but his movement was sluggish and weak. He tried to grip Astraeos’s shoulder. The ceramite was vibrating as he touched it. Ahriman stopped moving back down the passage they had flown down. The walls were shaking as if in rhythm to a rising tide.

  +Which one?+

  +I don’t know,+ sent Ahriman.

  The end of the passage glowed as walls bent and flexed like the inside of an arching snake. Astraeos let go of Ahriman, and raised his bolt pistol. Light spilled forwards, clawed and horned shadows reaching down the walls. Ahriman found he still had his sword in his hand. He tried to raise the blade but the movement made him roll in the zero gravity.

  A stuttering streak of flame sprang from behind them. The daemons vanished behind a wall of phosphor-bright detonations. Ahriman turned. Another burst of flame split the passage. A figure in armour the colour of dull copper was advancing from behind them, firing as he moved, his feet locking to the floor with each step. The vox spat to life in Ahriman’s ear.

  ‘Take the central door. One hundred metres, then left turn fifty metres.’ Thidias’s voice was emotionless, but Ahriman could taste the focus in the warrior’s mind.

  ‘Where is Kadin?’ shouted Astraeos. Thidias gave the smallest twitch of his head in reply, took a step towards the daemons and fired a broad burst. Ahriman could see that the fire pattern was taking all of the warrior’s focus.

  ‘I do not know,’ said Thidias. The last round coughed from Thidias’s bolter. He stepped forwards, pulled the clip from the weapon, loaded, and fired again in the space of a breath. The passage in front of him was ablaze, phosphex and oxygen gel burning white-hot on the walls and floor. Beyond the glare, Ahriman could see the daemons recoil like wolves on the edge of torchlight. ‘Last contact was before the station…’ Words failed Thidias, but he needed to say nothing more.

  Ahriman looked towards the central of the three doorways, and then back to Astraeos.

  ‘Go,’ said Thidias. ‘I will hold.’

  For how long? thought Ahriman, but he kicked off towards the central doorway.

  ‘Go,’ said Thidias again, and Ahriman glanced back. Astraeos had not moved from beside his brother. ‘Go, brother.’

  ‘We stand as one,’ growle
d Astraeos. Pale lightning was playing around his fists, and Ahriman could feel the Librarian trying to draw power from the warp.

  ‘No,’ said Thidias. ‘You always were bad at judging character.’ He was firing in short controlled bursts, stepping forwards to change the angle of his shots. With every explosive splash of fire the daemons were closer, their bodies flickering between impressions of limbs, eyes, hands and teeth. Thidias turned his head for a second to look at Astraeos.

  ‘You will go, and I will stand alone. It is my choice.’ The Librarian was silent for a second then kicked off in a leaping bound towards the door. Ahriman crossed the threshold just in front of him. They scrambled towards the waiting dark, while behind them, muzzle flashes strobed on.

  Half blind with fatigue, they moved with heedless speed, spiralling and crashing, until they spilled from the door into the cavern and saw the gunship waiting. The muzzles of the wing-mounted heavy bolters glowed dark red. Something had already come for the gunship. Globular flesh, scraps of metal and spent cases formed an expanding cloud. Ahriman pushed off from the door frame. The cooling mouths of the guns swivelled to face him. Sensor discs sent identification signals, and his battered armour answered. The guns went still. Unable to slow or steer his flight, Ahriman hit the craft’s blunt wing with a bone-jarring clang. He grasped the wing before he spun into the vast darkness of the cavern. Astraeos hit the tail fin an instant later, and almost lost his grip.

  Slowly Ahriman pulled himself down the wing. The ramp was still open, and dim red light diluted the gloom of the crew compartment. Ahriman had begun to climb the ramp when he saw the figure waiting within.

  Thidias stopped firing. His clip was empty. Light filled the passage in front of him, the bright white of phosphex dancing in the blackness of the daemons’ eyes. He let go of the bolter, and his last touch sent it gliding into the narrowing space between him and his foe. He drew his knife and pistol. The daemons came on without pause. Red target runes spread across his eyes as he aimed the bolt pistol. He began to fire, switching from target to target without thinking. Daemons fell. Bodies burst like bloated sacks of skin. A smell of rotting meat and spice filled his mouth and nose. He pushed the sensation away, and kept firing. The round counter ticked towards zero in the corner of his eye.