The Omnibus - John French Read online

  ‘Do they know what Amon intends?’

  Ahriman shook his head.

  ‘Then why do they answer his call?’

  ‘Power,’ breathed Ahriman, still picking out the ships of different warbands – some whose names he knew, many which he did not. ‘Power burns bright in these realms. These others are carrion hoping to ride on the fires of Amon’s ascent. They do not care what that end is, only that they can feed on the warmth while it lasts.’

  ‘Look, more come,’ said Astraeos, nodding to a screen that had flared with static and then showed an image of two long-prowed ships sliding from the warp. Multi-coloured energy hung from them as the wound in the black sheet of stars closed behind them. Astraeos glanced again at Ahriman.

  ‘You are sure they will not detect our presence?’

  Ahriman nodded but did not look up. Soon, Carmenta would cut the power throughout the ship. The engines would go cold and they would drift towards the gathering on momentum alone, as black and cold as the void. While the ice clotted in the outer holds, Ahriman’s mind would keep turning, the formulae in his consciousness feeding the incantation that hid the presence of the ship from other minds. Scratched into the bones of the ship, the Sign of Thothmes had been expanded far beyond its original purpose. Ahriman thought of Magnus closing the sign over meetings of his inner circle, shielding their deliberations from the minds and eyes of others. The use he put it to now was far from what he could have imagined then.

  Necessity changes everything, he thought.

  ‘Another hour of burn, then darken the ship,’ he said.

  Astraeos gave a nod, and he left Ahriman watching the fleet of his brother grow larger and closer.

  Darkness fell across the ship and cold came with it. Ahriman could see temperature warnings flare at the edge of his helmet display as he approached the door to his chamber. There was no light except the glow of his eyepieces. He passed a servitor that was moving with determined slowness. Dark marks and blisters had spread across the exposed flesh of its arms and face. He could hear its gears squealing as they froze. The air had stopped circulating first, and what remained had become dense and misted with ice particles from the last breaths of moisture. Everything was quiet, slowing like blood cooling in a corpse after the last beat of its heart.

  We are become like the dead, he thought, as he tasted blood and silver again. He could not feel the slivers in his chest any more, but he could taste their poison draining his mind.

  He reached the circular hatch and pulled it open with a scream of frozen iron. The blackness within was absolute, and his helmet display created a scene of shapes formed in faded green. There were the bowls of oil for light, there the hard sleeping pallet, and there the chest. He moved to it, hesitating before he opened the lid. The objects lay within as they had before. He knelt and picked out the chipped scarab. He breathed slowly, feeling the weight of the gemstone in his palm. He felt something stir within its heart, a kernel of sympathetic memories unfolding into his mind.

  There were pyramids of glass burning. There were animal shapes in grey armour wading through lakes of black water. There were… He shut the memory off. He did not need to see it again. There was no lesson it could teach other than the lesson of pain.

  He looked down. The helm looked back at him. Its dust-filmed eyes seemed black, and the marks beneath each eye looked like paths carved by tears. He paused, his hand halted halfway to reaching into the chest.

  Am I right to come here? The thought bubbled to the surface. He felt the doubt in his mind, the rolling surge of questions without end. He could hardly remember what he had been before the Rubric. No doubts, just the certainty of hubris.

  He gave a short bark of laughter that echoed coldly in the chamber. It would always be a part of him now, a wound that would never heal. I had to come, I am responsible. I cannot flee that truth no matter how far I run.

  He reached down and touched the helm’s bronze faceplate. He waited, but no surge of memory came, no flowering of revelation, just the hardness of dusty metal beneath his fingers.

  Do I even have the right to judge what Amon does? He remembered the clear brightness of the belief that he would set everything right. Hope. A fool’s gold glinting in the palm of cruel fate. And yet… and yet…

  The helm felt light in his hand. He had not realised he had picked it up. Dust fell from it, sparkling green in his augmented sight.

  The prophecies and visions may be wrong. I may be wrong. The words of daemons, of oracles, of faces glimpsed in dreams and visions rose in his memory.

  You remember this path even though you shunned it…

  Others will dare the paths you do not. It is fated…

  Fate has come for you, Ahriman, as you feared it would and knew it must…

  The Legion will die. It will become less than the dust that the Rubric made it…

  I see lines of choice vanish into darkness and I cannot see their ends….

  There may be another way. There may be a path not just of survival but of hope, of restoration, of redemption….

  There is a choice.

  He raised the helm until he could see the light of his eyes reflected in its dust-covered lenses.

  Gas whispered out in a frozen cloud as he unfastened his helmet and dropped it to the deck. He was blind, wrapped in sudden darkness, as the cold crawled over his skin with frosted fingers. He gripped the other helm, and turned it by touch. He could feel ice crystals forming on his lips. The helm slid over his head and locked into place, with a hiss of pressurisation. He could smell the dust, a gritty taste on the first breath he took. The helmet display blinked to wakefulness. Pictograms flowed across his eyes in turquoise, amber and red. He turned his head, seeing the world again in bright white lines. He felt the stillness of certainty.

  I am responsible, he thought as he walked from the chamber. I always was. For good or ill.

  They would hit something soon, she was sure of it. That, or something would detect them. It was only a matter of time and, as every nanosecond passed, the probabilities slid further down towards an abyss of certainty. The Titan Child was deep within the gathering enemy fleet. Her shields were down, her reactors reduced to an ember glow, and her sensors running on so little power that she was almost blind. There were hundreds of ships out there. She had plotted a trajectory through them, but without power she was drifting on momentum alone, unable to move, a dead lump of metal.

  A pair of cruisers cut across her path. One second they were not there, and then they were looming into her awareness so close she could feel the heat wash of their engines. They dwarfed her. Once they might have been recognisable as ships of the Imperium, but those features had long been lost. Their hulls were bronzed and chewed by battle scars, like the face of a slave fighter. Piled structures shaped like faces rose from their hulls, and she could sense the waiting guns projecting from their mouths.

  She felt calculations surge through her, estimating velocities and vectors. The bronze ships were getting closer. She would have to fire her engines soon. But her reactors were all but dead. The calculations spiralled on and the ships loomed closer.

  She had to wake the reactors. Yes, that was the only way. Wake the reactors and let her heart beat again. Let her live again. She was paralysed, suffocating in the void, a dumb iron arrow thrown blind into oblivion.

  You will not survive this, came a voice in her soul. We will die here. All will be lost. We will be become crippled shadows. Broken. Halved.

  The cruisers slipped past her without a collision.

  Somewhere, she was breathing hard. She could feel a heart racing in rising panic. She tried to correct it, but the blood it pumped was roaring through her faster and faster.

  Another ship slid past her, its engines burning into her half-blinded sensors. The risk calculations screamed again in her awareness. She was cold and blind and she would not survive this madness.

  She had to waken, she had to… She must…

  Ahriman has le
d us to this folly, spoke the voice again. He cannot be trusted. This time we will not survive.

  What can I do? What must I do?

  The answer did not come in words. She remembered the Mechanicus fleet coming, appearing in the night sky above her birth world. They had hidden the stars with iron. She remembered the vast cylinders of Titan drop-pods falling through the atmosphere like the fists of gods. The information links had filled with broken words and fragments of data, the screams of dying machines. She had watched and listened as her clan died, as the world which cradled them died. They had screamed at her as she ran: streams of broken machine code, ciphers of anger and hurt and despair. She had listened to them all until they were too faint to hear any more. She knew they had died. The clan of mystics bonded to their machines had died screaming at her for her betrayal. All had hated her in those last moments, of that she was certain. But she had lived, and her other self, the iron creature of the void with a heart of fire, had lived as well. She had known what to do then, what she had to do for her Titan Child.

  She felt calm. Carefully, slowly, she eased power from her sensors to a communication array. She would only have enough for a signal no stronger than a murmur, but it would be enough to save her.

  ‘I am the Titan Child,’ she said in a whisper of signal code, ‘and I must speak to Lord Amon.’

  XVII

  DARKNESS

  ‘Ahriman?’ Carmenta’s machine voice was weak in his ear. A whisper, he thought.

  ‘Yes, mistress?’ He had been making for Astraeos’s chambers. Now he stopped. There was something in Carmenta’s voice, a note that he could hear even through the lifeless modulation of her words. She was linked to the ship, of course. In a sense it was the ship’s voice she was using.

  ‘Come to the command deck.’ There was something wrong, he could tell. Something colouring even the cold machine words. Had they been discovered? They must be close to the heart of Amon’s gathering. Something could have detected their presence. Perhaps his psychic masking was flawed. No, he would know. But what else could have edged Carmenta’s voice with tension?

  ‘What has happened?’ he said.

  ‘You have to see it yourself,’ replied Carmenta.

  The three Storm Eagle gunships slid through the dark in a triangular formation. Each was painted an arterial crimson, but in the void, they appeared black. The thin light of stars picked out the hints of rows and rows of pictograms etched across the hull of each craft, each no larger than a finger bone. Across the underside of the crafts’ wings, engraved gold feathers spread in mimicry of the wings of true birds of prey. No lights betrayed their approach, and their engine flames glowed a cold blue that was quickly lost to the eye. They could not see what they were making for, but that did not matter. They followed a single signal that pulsed through the void.

  When the ship did appear in front of them, they were so close that they had to bank sharply to avoid crashing. They skimmed the scorched and gouged hull, following the signal’s siren call. They looped high towards the bridge that punched from its upper hull like a fist. They passed holes the size of battle tanks, unhealed in the thick armour plating. Even at a few metres’ range the ship seemed dead. Only the guiding signal gave the lie to that perception.

  The landing-bay doors opened to greet them. The three Storm Eagles glided through the opening and settled onto the metal deck, their thrusters briefly surrounding them in a cloud of white mist. The ramps at the front of each gunship hinged open. The figures that marched onto the deck did so in complete unity, their armoured bulk hidden by the low light and the dissipating clouds of thruster fog.

  Three figures emerged last of all. Each wore robes of silver and bone over their red armour. Wide crests flared above their helms, one resembling a cobra, another topped by the twin serpent, the third a disc worked like a rayed sun. The cobra-headed figure marked his steps with a staff topped by a black orb. Curved khopesh swords hung at the waist of the other two figures.

  A servitor shuffled from the shadows. It was a hunched, pitiful thing, its flesh withered in the copper and chrome of its mechanical frame. It stopped a pace from the armoured figures, and bowed like a rag doll folding to the floor.

  ‘Greetings,’ said the servitor in a voice like electricity sparking between wires. The three figures glanced at each other. ‘The mistress of the Titan Child calls you to follow.’ The servitor turned and began to shuffle away. After a second’s pause, the three figures and their silent entourages followed.

  Astraeos found Kadin in the central corridors. It had taken him some time to decide to tell him of Cadar’s fate. Warmth still lingered in the slowly stagnating air of the vessel’s core, but there was no light. Astraeos had tracked his brother by sound, listening for the thrum of powered armour and the hiss of pistons in the deepening silence. His brother was armoured but bareheaded, his eyes gazing directly ahead. In the ghost-green of Astraeos’s night vision, Kadin’s eyes glowed like jewels in sunlight. Three paces behind Kadin limped Maroth, chuckling and mewling, his vox-caster and speaker-grille cutting in and out. Astraeos felt anger bubble to the surface at the sight of the broken sorcerer.

  ‘Brother, there is something that we must speak of,’ called Astraeos.

  Kadin did not look at him but kept walking. ‘How nice that you still call me that.’

  ‘You are my brother, you always will be.’

  Kadin inclined his head, looked to Astraeos and then away with a thin smile on his lips.

  ‘Touching.’

  Maroth continued to chuckle, the sound chopping between speaker and vox, as if his armour itself were laughing.

  ‘Be silent,’ Astraeos spat. Maroth turned the muzzle of his helm from Astraeos to Kadin. Behind the faceplate, Astraeos knew the broken sorcerer was grinning.

  ‘Nothing left, nothing left,’ purred Maroth. ‘Not his brothers, not his honour, not his soul.’ Maroth tapped the lenses of his helm. ‘Only one eye with which to see how much he has lost.’

  Astraeos moved at blink-fast speed. His foot stamped into Maroth’s chest with a crack of metal on ceramite. Maroth lifted from his feet and hit the passage wall, and Astraeos was on him before he could slide to the floor. Rage ran through Astraeos in a hot red cloud. All he could see was the wreck of his past and the tatters of everything he had tried to preserve. He had failed; every time he had tried he had failed. Maroth spluttered, wet noises coming out in chopped lumps from his speaker-grille. Astraeos thought he was still laughing. He put his foot on Maroth’s chest as the sorcerer tried to rise.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Kadin. Astraeos kept his eyes fixed on Maroth, seeing the one who had transformed Cadar and taken his brothers’ eyes.

  ‘No, Ahriman promised,’ screamed Maroth, the words wet and mixed with broken teeth and blood.

  Astraeos roared and raised his foot to stamp down on Maroth. The image of Cadar’s body looking back at him with empty voids for eyes filled his mind.

  He paused, breathing hard. His ears were ringing with rage. He wanted to strike again, to feel that release of letting anger and muscle become one. He let out a long, shaking breath.

  ‘You are losing yourself, brother,’ said Astraeos, jerking his head at where Maroth lay. ‘You let him follow you like a dog. After what he was, what he did–’

  ‘No, Astraeos.’ Kadin’s voice was quiet, but it cut through Astraeos like a cold knife. ‘I lost myself long ago, as did you.’

  ‘No, we still–’

  ‘Have honour? Astraeos, you beggared that long ago. I am not what I was, and neither are you. Would Codicier Astraeos have done that?’ Kadin glanced to where Maroth was trying to pick himself up off the floor. ‘We are changed and changing. What we were is gone.’ Kadin paused. His rasping voice sounded tired. ‘We have Ahriman, and that is all. We are all dogs following at his feet.’

  Astraeos opened his mouth to reply, found he had no words. His rage had drained away. He felt suddenly empty, the feeling spreading out and through him.
/>   No, he thought. The emptiness that bubbled up inside him had been there since the ships of the Inquisition and the warriors in grey had fired on their home world. He tried not to look at his hands; he knew his fingers were shaking. What do I do? What am I now? What do I do?

  And then a new sensation hit Astraeos like a cold shadow passing over the sun, as if a light that he was not aware of had gone dark. His head twitched up, his eyes looking around for the source of the uncanny chill. He could hear the silence in his ears.

  ‘What was that?’ said Kadin. Astraeos looked at his brother. Kadin was looking up at the shadows at the edge of the corridor. Astraeos felt a shiver run across his skin.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Darkness, it is here.’ Maroth had pulled himself to his feet, his head rolling from side to side as he leant on the passage wall. Then he tipped his head up sharply at Astraeos. ‘Can’t you see it?’

  Astraeos blinked his helmet display to life, and opened a vox-channel.

  ‘Ahriman.’ Static was the only reply. He switched channels. ‘Mistress Carmenta.’

  Silence.

  Astraeos glanced at his brother. Kadin nodded. They began to run, unclamping weapons as they moved. Behind them Maroth followed, breathing curses to himself.

  Ahriman paused before the entrance to the bridge. He had felt something, something subtle and distant like a movement under the surface of dark water, or the quick hiding of a lamp beneath a cloth. He turned, his eyes moving across the shadows at the edge of the antechamber. Nothing, just a feeling. But everything was a sign; he had learned that truth long ago.

  He peeled off a portion of his mind. His hand shifted on the grip of his sword. He waited, but there was nothing. He turned back to the doors and pressed his hand against the opening seal. The doors ground back into the walls. He froze.

  Darkness. Complete darkness waited for him beyond the doors. No wink of system lights, not even the smallest kernel of luminescence from a servitor’s eye. He felt something, the tiniest imperfection in his thought processes. He had missed something. No, he had seen something out of the corner of his eye, something that was bending light and shadow around it, something that was hiding just out of sight. Suddenly, he was very aware of how tired he was, and of the psychically toxic silver lodged in his chest.