The Omnibus - John French Read online

  They had not been able to remove the armour from Kadin’s remaining flesh, nor had they been able to recolour its blackened plates. Carmenta had personally fitted what augmetics were available. That at least had been successful, almost worryingly so. Kadin’s flesh had begun to grow and embrace the metal replacements. His right and left arms now ended in three-digit pincers of brushed steel. Below the waist, he walked on a pair of back-jointed legs, which hissed at every step. A bolter and double-edged chainsword were mag-clamped to his back.

  Carmenta felt a tingle as another wash of signal from the approaching ship hit the Titan Child’s sensors. Her attention strayed from the sights in front of her, as a part of the still-waking ship began to break the signal ciphers apart. There was something about the hailing signals, something hidden in the weave of their code…

  The cipher cracked open.

  She blinked, suddenly terrified. She was trapped, crammed into a shell of soft meat joined to weak metals. She could not feel the void on her outer layer. She could not feel the beat pulse of her plasma core. She began to panic. She could not move. She did not understand what had happened to her. Her flesh shell was quivering. She did not understand why. She–

  Carmenta gasped and staggered on the hoist platform. A ripple of sparks spiralled up the bundle of cables that linked her with the Titan Child. For a second, she could hear nothing but the panicked chatter of machines roaring to life in a disorganised spasm. Lights flickered on and off in the hold. The hull creaked. Somewhere in the ship, power began to flood sleeping systems.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ahriman was on his feet. Carmenta blurted static-filled machine code, feeling the sharp sounds grate in her still-human throat. She was swaying, her mechadendrites grabbing blindly at the air. Ahriman vaulted onto the hoist platform. One of the metal tentacles snapped at him but he batted it away with a thought.

  ‘What–’ he began.

  ‘The ship,’ said Carmenta. ‘It is afraid, it’s trying to get ready to fight or run.’ The lights above them were strobing faster and faster, like a rising heartbeat. ‘The ship that is coming…’ She felt the world sway around her. ‘It’s not just an Imperial ship. It is the Inquisition.’

  ‘Multiple energy blooms,’ blurted a servitor wired into the sensor systems. ‘Full threat alert initiated.’ Iobel heard the words, and was already clamping her helm over her head. Red light filled the command nave of the Lord of Mankind. Blast doors were dropping over the exits. A static charge filled the air as a null field activated. Iobel felt a wave of nausea as the field smothered her psychic sense.

  ‘A trap,’ hissed Malkira from beside her. A cyber-cherub with wings of beaten copper lowered a dome-shaped helm over the crone’s head. It locked in place with a hiss of air.

  ‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Erionas, his voice flat calm. ‘There are other possibilities.’

  ‘Target energy flow fluctuating,’ called a servitor. ‘Target shields sporadically active. Engines firing.’

  A silver-coated servo-skull drifted over Iobel’s shoulder. It held a boltgun in calliper hands. Iobel reached out and took the weapon, feeling the targeting display inside her helm come alive as she touched the gold-worked casing.

  ‘If it is not a trap, what other explanation could there be?’ she asked, glancing at Erionas.

  ‘Target vessel firing weapons,’ said the servitor.

  ‘Increasingly unlikely ones,’ said Erionas. His eyes opened, two bright spheres of glass gazing out at the red-lit chamber. ‘All weapons prepare to fire.’

  Ahriman felt the hull shake. Munitions impacts, he judged. He turned to Carmenta. She was twitching, trying to stand as sparks ran over her black robes.

  ‘How far out is the enemy ship?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ she gasped.

  ‘You must. How far?’

  ‘They have yet to reach optimal firing distance.’

  He nodded. It was as he guessed and it was not good. They were supposed to be closer, much, much closer.

  ‘Get control of this ship,’ he snarled, and turned to Astraeos. ‘Astraeos, Kadin, here.’ He was reaching into Astraeos’s mind even as he stepped to the deck.

  +Ascend,+ he sent, as his own consciousness climbed to perfect focus. He felt Astraeos’s thoughts resonate with his own. He began to loop his thoughts, sending separate patterns spinning through his mind like pinwheels, each gathering power. The design etched into the floor began to glow, fire-orange light radiating from where they stood at its centre. The power in his mind called to the etched symbols, and they answered him. He felt the swelling power roar with hunger that he alone could not feed.

  +Now,+ he sent to Astraeos, and raised his hands. His mind touched Astraeos’s consciousness and linked to it.

  It was like standing at the site of a lightning strike. Around them the Titan Child vanished, and Ahriman’s mind soared across space like a burning comet.

  ‘Accelerate. Maintain fire,’ called Erionas, his voice raised over the babble of machines and voices. ‘Burn it to nothing.’ Iobel watched the crew respond. Her throne and the deck beneath it were shaking in time with the recoil of hundreds of guns.

  ‘Target impacts are good,’ purred Erionas. Iobel could tell he was watching the direct gunnery dataflow. ‘We will need to be closer to finish her off, but annihilation will be complete.’

  ‘So sure?’ said Malkira, the speaker-grille of her helm robbing her voice of none of its scorn.

  ‘Yes,’ said Erionas. ‘We will have virtually destroyed them before they are in effective range.’

  Iobel found herself nodding, but not because of the words. Her skin felt taut. A sour taste of metal ran over her tongue. There was something wrong, she could feel it. On her chest, the chronotrap’s cogs began to whirl faster.

  They should have turned and left the wreck to its fate, they should have kept course for Cadia. They should…

  She stopped her thoughts. Her eyes were closed, her breath and pulse still. She let her perceptions settle, trying to see the pattern in the whirl of emotion and sensations. On the Lord of Mankind, she alone was a psyker. Her ability was low grade, barely a functioning talent, but in that moment she knew that something was very, very wrong. It was like a building wave of pressure rolling in front of a storm.

  ‘Something is coming.’ Her voice was cold, and only she heard the tremble at its root.

  ‘What–’ began Erionas, but at that moment Iobel felt something slam into her mind with the force of a tidal wave. Around the bridge, machines, servitors and people were yelling. Every chronotrap across the ship began to hiss as their cogs spun to a blur.

  Astraeos could still see even with his eyes closed. He could see Ahriman stood to his right, his arms outstretched, his physical form lost in a white blaze of light. He could see Kadin, his face coldly impassive. Ahriman spoke another phrase, and the world became a shape with too many dimensions that spun away like a leaf caught on the wind. The deck beneath their feet was gone, though he could still feel it. Stars surrounded them. Astraeos did not need to look at Ahriman to see him; the sorcerer’s mind was burning like a sun, sucking in all other light, growing brighter and brighter. The stars were turning, whirling to broken rainbows against the void. Only the three of them remained fixed, only they were still, everything else was movement. They were skimming beneath the void, looking out at the stars like fish seeing clouds turn above the surface of the sea.

  A vast shape loomed suddenly in front of them. It was a ship, jagged, stardust-pitted, a black knife cutting through the void beyond the veil of swirling stars. Fire surrounded it, streaking from its crenellated flanks. They dived towards it. He felt something shatter around them, as if they had broken through a pane of glass. They were inside the ship. He could see shapes around him. They were translucent, glass-spun outlines of walls, doors, and pipework. Then reality snapped into place with a roar of sirens and the sound of tearing metal.

  XIV

  TAKEN

  Silvan
us woke from his drug coma with a gasp. His mundane eyes opened to the flash of warning lights. The chair enclosing his body shook as his back arched, and his fingers raked at the black leather. He vomited, heaving mucus from his empty stomach. He could feel the awakening drugs grating through his body, flushing away his dreams in a chemical rush. His heart was hammering in a broken rhythm.

  He scrambled up, pulling needle-tipped tubes from his body. Liquid dribbled from the needle marks as he moved. He could not see properly, the emergency awakening still fogging his eyes, but that did not matter. All that mattered was reaching the observation cupola. They were in a full emergency: that was the only reason he would have been woken in such a brutal manner. It meant that there was an incursion within the ship, or a primary level threat. He needed to be able to steer a course should the ship have to translate to the warp.

  He tried to run. His legs skidded out from underneath him, and the cold deck came up to meet him hard. The air went out of his lungs. He gasped, lying on the floor.

  You’re a fool, Sil, he thought to himself. He came up onto his knees, and he felt the need to throw up again. A fool for thinking this was a good idea, and a fool for agreeing. After a moment of trying to stop the world spinning, he did vomit.

  In the corner of the chamber, the hulking shape of his warden clanked forwards. Silvanus looked up at its machine gaze, and tried a grin.

  The warden stopped above him, looking down with a cluster of glowing red lenses. Its body was a vaguely humanoid sculpture of green-lacquered armour plates. Somewhere within its metal shell its lobotomised brain watched him. Its weapon-arms were hissing, fully charged and ready to fire. It was there to protect him, but it would also kill him if he ever showed a sign of corruption by the warp.

  Silvanus reached a hand up towards the warden. An articulated limb snapped out of its side, revealing a multi-faceted scanning lens. A sensor ray swept over Silvanus’s naked body; he felt its touch as a static tickle inside his skin. Its scan complete, the warden took a heavy step back, leaving Silvanus on the floor, hand still weakly raised.

  ‘Good to see you too,’ said Silvanus.

  He paused, took another breath, and finally managed to stand up. His head felt like an explosion had gone off in his skull. He swayed, glad that there were no mirrors in his chamber; something told him that his current state would not have had a positive effect on his appearance.

  He was tall, like all his bloodline, and unusually thickset, which only meant that he had slightly more flesh than a skeleton. Powder-white skin and scarlet eyes completed the overall aesthetic. Besides a few tubes hanging from needles still embedded in his flesh, the only thing he wore was a bandana of black silk and silver thread. The strip of fabric wound across his forehead, its ends hanging down between his shoulders. Beneath the thick silk, his third eye stared out blindly at the physical world.

  Muttering low curses at past decisions, Silvanus pulled a blue silk robe over his head. The fabric stuck to wet patches of drying blood and injection medium. A smell of flowers was thick in his nose, and he could taste strange, metallic flavours on his tongue, another consequence of a shock awakening. They kept him in a drug coma when he was not navigating, or preparing to navigate. It was a safety measure, one among many designed to minimise the risk of sending a ship into the Eye. Silvanus had laughed when they had told him, but they had not seen the joke.

  He limped towards a door of black metal on the far side of the chamber. A golden eye sat in the heart of a rayed sun of orange topaz at the door’s centre. He raised his left hand as he approached the door. A luminous sun and eye emblem bloomed across his palm, and the door split down the middle.

  Beyond was a lift, its walls lined with black stone. Silvanus stepped in and paused while the warden clanked through the door behind him. A second later the door sealed, and the lift shot upwards. As he heard the chains pull them towards the observatory high on the spine of the Lord of Mankind, Silvanus Yeshar, Navigator Primus of House Yeshar, wondered what had triggered the alert which had woken him. After a moment of consideration, he decided he really did not want to know.

  Ahriman felt the shockwave as the Imperial ship’s psychic protection broke. Fragments of invisible barriers spun in the warp like shattered crystal. Across the ship, null field generators burnt out and silver wards melted to run down walls in white hot tears. His head was reeling, filled with images of racing stars. They had reached the objective, the translocation ritual had worked, but they would die now, in the space of a handful of heartbeats, if he failed in this moment.

  He closed his eyes, and let all thoughts fall away. His mind was clear. The pulse of blood through his body was an ocean surge, low and controlled. He could feel his muscles relax, and his armour mimicked them. Above it all, he floated, a mind without thought, with infinite choice and unfixed possibility. He felt sensations run through his flesh, tugging at his attention, screaming to let them rule his mind and body. He held still. Half-formed thoughts passed through him like clouds across a blue sky. He let them pass.

  His heart beat once.

  He had not done this in a long time. Even when Tolbek had come for him, he had fought from instinct. This, though, this would be different.

  He let the sensations of his physical self return fully. His mind searched for imbalance in his body chemistry. He had to have balance. To enter the mind of battle everything needed to be in balance. He was crouched on one knee, he realised: his head bent as if in prayer, his fingertips resting on the floor.

  He stood, and opened his eyes.

  Debris was still falling around him. He could see torn slivers of metal spinning slowly amongst shreds of burning parchment. The walls had buckled outwards as if hit by a Titan’s fist, and they were glowing with heat. Beside him, Astraeos was still straightening, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword. Kadin was a pace further away, standing just as he had been in the hold of the Titan Child. Red light covered them, caught in the moment before it strobed off and blinked back. A fog half filled the roof, venting from ducts in the ceiling. He could sense the toxins in the fog, the potential for death waiting in each particle. At their backs was darkness, in front of them a door of riveted metal. A yellowed skull stared at Ahriman from the centre of a tri-barred ‘I’ worked into the door in black marble. He did not recognise the symbol.

  His hearts beat again.

  Thoughts, reasoning and logic slotted back into place like cogs in clockwork. This was what it was to be a Magister Templi of the Thousand Sons, this was what the Imperium had never grasped; power was nothing without balance. Reason to balance force, will to balance passion, coldness to balance fury.

  Ahriman sensed Astraeos reaching into the warp, drawing power to him like a choking man gulping air. Foolish, rash, unbalanced. The warp submitted to will, but to the balanced mind and body it gave the power to soar. Ahriman waited. He was ready, his mind rooted, its processes running with perfect precision. He expanded his awareness. There were people coming for them; they were running down the corridor on the other side of the door.

  Kadin had taken a stride, the pistons of his augmetic legs bunching in place of muscle. The door in front of them remained shut.

  Ahriman selected his patterns of thought and formulae, placing them within the blank sheet of his mind like a surgeon arranging razors on a silver tray.

  He was ready.

  His hearts beat once.

  Kadin’s step crashed down. Red light strobed across Ahriman as he flicked out a telepathic command.

  +Down.+

  Astraeos ducked. Kadin twisted, trying to shrug the command off even as he crashed into the passage wall.

  Fire sprang from Ahriman’s eyes. The air roared as it cooked. The white-hot beam struck the door and bored through it like a spear through fat. Liquid metal sprayed out in a molten flower. The hole in the door widened, rippling outwards, glowing brighter and brighter.

  Ahriman could feel the presence of minds beyond the door, fourteen still alive
, one fading to nothing, ten already gone. His telekinetic blow hit the door and blew the remains out in a cone of molten metal rain. The troopers that had been crouching in the passage beyond vanished as the pressure wave lifted them from their feet and mashed them into the walls. Some further back held their nerve and began to fire. Shots clouded the glowing breach in the door.

  Ahriman walked forwards. Cold light followed him, wrapping his body, spiralling around him as if in an invisible wind. The troopers kept firing as he stepped through the breach. Las-bolts and hard rounds flared as they met the cloak of light and began to spin, forming an accelerating column. Ahriman kept walking, the cyclone turning around him sucking up debris from the floor; swelling, turning faster and faster, beginning to glow as the fragments abraded to sand. Lightning crackled across its surface. Ahriman could feel his mind holding every particle as it flew.

  He reached the door. A wall of fire rose to meet him. He released the cyclone and it tore forwards.

  The storm broke over the troopers and tore them into fragments of bone and tatters of flesh. It swept on, scraping the passage walls to shining metal, and smearing everything with a wet red film. Ahriman walked in its wake, his eyes closed as his mind leapt ahead, running under the skin of the ship, sensing and hunting like a loosed hound.

  Iobel pulled herself to her feet. There was blood smeared across the inside of her helmet. She reached up and yanked it off.

  ‘Emergency protocol–’ protested Malkira as Iobel took a breath. The air of the command chamber stank of burning wiring and overheating machines. Iobel tasted blood on her lips. Her head felt as if something were trying to crack it open. The chronotrap on her chest was whining, its cogs spinning faster than she could see.

  ‘Shut up,’ she said, and spat onto the floor. Malkira went still. Unable to see her face, Iobel wondered if the old crone had died of shock.