Void Stalker (29 page)

‘Your augmetic aspects, while impressive, are far too limited for you to interface with the machine-spirit of my vessel.’

He gestured to the rocks quivering on the unreliable hololithic. ‘You trust servitors and a machine-spirit to fly out of
this?’

Deltrian made an affirmative sound. ‘More than any human. What… what a strange query.’

Septimus had relented, but remained on the bridge by the pilot-servitor’s throne.

The slave and the adept, along with the two-dozen servitors and robed crew, were watching the hololithic projection that served as tactical map and occulus alike. Unlike the
Echo
’s
holo-imagery, Deltrian’s was watery and flickered at intervals that pained Septimus’s human eye. Looking through his bionic took away the ache, and helped resolve some of the flickering interference. Only then did he realise it was a projection designed to be viewed by augmetic eyes.

The ship itself was a rounded, bloated beetle of a vessel, bristling with defensive turrets, with almost three-quarters of its length given up to the drive engines and warp generators. Bulkheads sealed those areas of the ship off from the habitable areas, and Septimus had seen several of the adepts wearing rebreather masks while entering and leaving the engine decks.

The entire vessel was cramped to the point of madness. To make room for the vessel’s armour, weapons systems and propulsion, every tunnel was a narrow walkway, and every chamber was a squat box featuring the essential systems
and
enough room for a single operator. The command deck was the most spacious area of the whole ship, and even that offered no room to move if eight people were present at once.

Septimus watched the ship’s identifier rune pulsing on the hololithic, attached to an asteroid as it hid from the aliens’ scanners. Far across the field of malformed rocks, the rune signifying the
Echo
was a speck among a nest of angry signals.

‘The
Echo
is almost there,’ he said. ‘They’re going to make it.’

Septimus turned his head at a familiar sound. Variel walked in, his armour joints humming with every movement.

‘Tell me what’s happening,’ he demanded, as calm as ever.

‘It doesn’t look like they know we’re here,’ Septimus let his eyes drift back to the hololithic.

‘Tell me about the
Echo,
idiotic mortal.’

Septimus had the grace to force a smile, abashed at the obviousness of his mistake. ‘They’re going to make it, Lord Variel.’

The Apothecary showed no emotion at the use of the honorific, just as he never showed any emotion the many times Septimus had or hadn’t used it before. Such things were less than meaningless to him.

‘Am I to assume we will be departing soon?’

Deltrian nodded, doing his best to simulate the human movement on a neck not designed to flex in such subtle ways. Something locked at the top of his spine, and he had to take a moment to will the vertebrae coupling to loosen.

‘Affirmative,’ he vocalised.

Variel moved to where Septimus stood, watching the hololithic himself. ‘What is that?’ he gestured to another runic signifier.

‘That…’ Septimus reached down to the servitor pilot’s console, and adjusted the hololithic display with a few tapped keys. ‘…is the Genesis Chapter’s strike cruiser we destroyed months ago.’

Variel didn’t smile, which was no surprise to Septimus. His pale blue eyes blinked once as he regarded the hololithic image of the broken cruiser, its hull left open to the void. He reached down to magnify the image, taking in the absolute devastation where the warship lay dead at the heart of the Talosian Density, among the thickest cluster of asteroids above the broken moon.

‘That was a particularly satisfying kill,’ the Night Lord noted.

‘Aye, lord.’

Variel glanced at him with those disquieting eyes. After almost ten years in service to the Eighth Legion, Septimus would have gambled on nothing being able to unnerve him anymore. Variel’s eyes seemed to be a rare exception.

‘What is wrong with you?’ the Apothecary asked. ‘Your heart rate is elevated. You reek of some moronic, emotional excitement.’

Septimus inclined his head to the hololithic. ‘It’s difficult to watch them fight without us. Serving the Legion is all I’ve done for most of my adult life. Without that… I’m not even sure I know who I am.’

‘Yes, yes. Fascinating.’ He turned to Deltrian. ‘Tech-priest. A question, to alleviate my boredom. I want to listen to the eldar’s communications. Can you leech their signal?’

‘Of course.’ Deltrian deployed two of his secondary limbs, letting them arch over his shoulders to work on a separate console. ‘I have no capacity to translate eldar linguistic vocalisations.’

That caught Variel’s attention. ‘Truly? Curious. I’d thought you’d be more enlightened than that.’

‘An adept of the Mechanicum has more pressing matters to attend to than the mumblings of wretched xenos-kind.’

‘No need to become irritated,’ Variel offered a momentary smile, as false as it was brief. ‘I speak several eldar dialects. Just leech the signal, if you are able.’

Deltrian paused before pulling the last lever. ‘Explain your mastery of the alien tongue.’

‘There is nothing to explain, honoured adept. I dislike ignorance. When the chance to learn something arises, I take it.’ He looked over at the robed figure. ‘Do you believe the Red Corsairs only battled the corrupt Imperium? We fought the eldar countless times. Captives were not unknown, either. You have one chance at guessing who extracted information from them through excruciation.’

‘I see.’ Deltrian accepted the answer with another attempt to simulate a nod. His spinal column, made of various precious metals reinforced by tiny plates of ceramite, clicked and whirred with the movement. As he engaged the lever, the bridge was flooded by sibilant alien whispers, distorted by vox crackle.

Variel spoke a word of thanks, and returned his attention to the hololithic. Septimus stood with him, his attention alternating between the unfolding battle and Variel’s pale face.

‘Stop looking at me,’ Variel said after a minute had passed. ‘It is getting annoying.’

‘What are the eldar saying?’ Septimus asked.

Variel listened for another half-minute, not seeming to pay overmuch attention. ‘They speak of manoeuvres in three
dimensions, comparing warship movements to ghosts and beasts of the sea. It is all very poetic, in a bland, worthless and alien way. No casualty reports yet. No sound of any eldar captains shrieking as their souls are cast adrift.’

It was suddenly clear to Septimus what Variel was really listening for. First Claw had been right; Variel really was one of the Eighth Legion, no matter the origins of his gene-seed.

‘I…’ the Apothecary started, then fell silent. The eldar voices whispered on in the background.

Septimus drew breath to ask, ‘What are they–’

Variel silenced him with a glare, his pale eyes narrowed in suspicious concentration. The slave crossed his arms over his chest, waiting and hoping for an explanation, but hardly expecting one.

‘Wait,’ Variel finally breathed, closing his eyes to better focus on the alien tongue. ‘Something is wrong.’

XXIII

A FATE DENIED

Octavia was doing
something she’d not dared in a long while. She was using her gift for pleasure, not for duty or necessity.

The Sea of Souls was not a source of easy indulgence, and her childhood was littered with a thousand tales told of Navigators who looked too long, too deep, into the warp’s tides. They never saw anything the same afterwards. One of the Mervallion family’s own scions – her cousin Tralen Premar Mervallion
–
was locked beneath the family spire in an isolation tank where he could do himself no more harm. The last time she’d seen him, he’d been floating in the murky fluids of an amniotic pool, leashed by restraint straps, now the proud and laughing owner of a ragged hole in the middle of his forehead where his third eye had been. She shivered at the memory, seeing the bubbles spilling up from his laughing mouth. He always laughed now. She’d hoped whatever fuelled his manic amusement offered some kind of solace, but she wasn’t naive enough to believe it.

She didn’t like to think of Tralen. Navigators were said to die from the removal of their warp eyes. It seemed there were some few, rare exceptions to that vile rule.

It had taken long enough to calm her nerves before risking her needless viewing, but with her human eyes closed and her bandana pulled free, the rest took no time at all. In truth, it was almost frighteningly easy – a similar sensation to falling from halfway up a difficult climb – but she knew she had the strength to pull herself back.

Octavia, once Eurydice of House Mervallion, m
ight
not have been born to a bloodline blessed as strong Navigators, but experience aboard the temperamental, wilful vessels of the Eighth Legion had honed what skills she possessed. She couldn’t help but wonder, as she gazed into the infinite black tides, how she would perform on the aptitude judgement arrays back on Holy Terra now. Had she grown stronger, or was it merely a matter of familiarity and confidence?

She’d never know. The odds of her ever setting foot on the Throneworld again were millions to one. That thought didn’t seem as bleak as it once had. She wasn’t sure why.

Curiosity forced her hand now, though. A less selfish, more perverse curiosity than dwelling on her own fate.
Seeing
into the Sea of Souls was as simple as opening her third eye. She didn’t need to be in the warp, though she knew some Navigators did. Few of them could compare the use of their gift with absolute common ground. Her father could only see into the warp with all three of his eyes open. She’d never known why; they all had their personal habits.

When she
saw,
she merely stared with her secret sight, watching the shadowy ebb and flow of the half-formed nothingness, shapeless yet tidal, formless yet serpentine. Shamans and witches from the primitive ages of Old Earth would consider it no different than a ritual allowing them to look into the layers of their mythical Hell.

But when she
searched,
she couldn’t help but hold her breath each time, until her hammering heart and aching lungs forced her to breathe again. She was aware, on some logical level, that she was projecting her sight through the unholy tides, perhaps even casting a fragment of consciousness into the ether – but Octavia cared little for the metaphysics at play. All that mattered was what she could find with her second sight.

In the madness of the eldar blockades, they’d run again and again, flowing through the tides along the path of least resistance. Talos’s psychic scream left the warp raw and abused, its veins swollen and its rivers in turmoil. She’d guided the ship as best she could, riding the winds rather than fighting too hard and risk the
Echo
breaking apart. All the while, she’d been caught between two states, seeing the sundered warp and feeling her hand resting on her swelling stomach.

Now, free from the pressure of navigating the warp, she was free to stare into it. Octavia stared harder, her sight reaching deeper, past the hundred shades of black outside the Astronomican’s light, seeking any source of light between the conflicting clouds.

For the first time, she started to see what Talos had done. The colliding waves of daemonic matter bled before her eyes, riven by savage wounds and leaking into one another. She watched them splitting and reforming, meshing and dividing, birthing screaming faces and dissolving them just as quickly. Hands reached out from the thrashing tide, melting and burning even as they gripped the outstretched claws of other nearby souls.

Octavia steadied herself, staring deeper. The wounded warp –
no,
she realised,
not wounded…. energised
– stretched on and on, the bleeding rivers meeting to become a bleeding ocean. How many worlds were choking in this invisible storm? How much terror would this spread?

She could hear her name in the crashing waves. A whisper, a scream, a plaintive cry…

Octavia pulled back. Her eye closed. Her eyes opened.

For a moment, fascination at what Talos had spread through dozens of solar systems gripped her more than the fear of having to fly through it. The warp was always in eternal flux, and in the hours after the scream first sounded, it had boiled with rejuvenation. Now, however, she was preparing to guide an unfamiliar ship into unsailable seas.

The Navigator replaced her bandana, retied her ponytail, and stretched in the uncomfortable throne, trying to ease the pressure on her backbone. She gave an idle thought for her attendants stationed outside the door, no doubt cramped in the narrow corridor. She missed Hound with a dull ferocity, and that in itself was painful to admit. More than that –
and how I hate to confess this, even to myself
– she wished Septimus was with her. He was incapable of ever saying the right thing, but even so. His self-conscious smile; the edge of amusement in his occasional glances; the way he slouched into his throne no matter how dire the threat seemed…

What a stupid, stupid place to fall in love,
she thought.
If that’s what it even is.

As Octavia shuffled in her seat, her eyes widened in sudden shock. As if afraid to touch her own flesh, she rested a hesitant hand on her stomach, where for the first time she felt the new life moving within her.

When the shields
died, Talos never moved in his throne. The crew – those standing, at least – were thrown from their feet in the sudden resurgence in violent shaking that gripped the ship. Two legless servitors fell from their installation sockets, mouths opening and closing as their useless hands worked at the floor, mimicking motions on consoles they could no longer reach.

‘Shields down, lord…’ called out one of the officers.

No, really?
Talos thought.

‘Understood,’ he replied through gritted teeth.

‘Orders, sire?’

The prophet had watched the grey world grow until it became a swollen orb taking up the occulus with its dreary, pockmarked visage.

Close now. So very close.

‘Damage report,’ he ordered.

As if the ship’s heaving wasn’t report enough. As if he needed some other confirmation that they were being cut apart in record
time
by alien pulsar fire. This many eldar ships, with that much firepower… the
Covenant of Blood
had never had to withstand that much damage in its distinguished career. The
Echo of Damnation
was enduring it for the first, and the last, time.

The officer, Rawlen, couldn’t tear his wide eyes from the console screen. ‘There’s… Lord, there’s too much to…’

‘Are we in drop-pod range for a surface assault?’

‘I…’

Talos vaulted
the
railing and landed with a crashing thud next to the officer. He turned to the screen himself, calculating the scrolling runes into some semblance of sense. With a snarl, he turned to the
v
ox-mistress.

‘Deploy the Legion,’ he growled over the chaos taking hold around them.

The woman, uniformed and branded in service to the Red Corsairs, started hitting key commands on her desk. ‘Legion deploying, lord.’

‘Vox-links,’ he demanded. ‘Vox-links now.’

‘Vox, aye.’

The voices of his brothers rasped their way across the shaking bridge, half-lost in the storm of noise and fire.

‘This is Talos to all Legion forces,’ he shouted. ‘Soul count. Report affirmative deployments.’

One by one, they called back to him. He heard the exultant yells of his brothers in their drop-pods as they reported back: ‘Second Claw away,’ ‘Fourth Claw deployed,’ and ‘Third Claw launched.’ The occulus re-tuned to show several Thunderhawk gunships blasting from the hangars for the final time, engines flaring white hot as they raced out into the stars.

Malcharion’s bass rumble heralded the war-sage’s departure.

‘I’ll see you on the carrion world, Soul Hunter.’

Three more confirmations followed, each with the same machine-growl voices. The occulus flashed back to show a scene from some mythical hell, fiery tides washing over the viewscreen like liquid flame.

‘We’re in the atmosphere,’ yelled one of the officers. ‘Orders?’

‘Does it matter?’ another screamed back.

‘Pull the ship up!’ one of the helmsmen shouted to the others.

Even Talos had to clutch at a railing as the
Echo
gave a horrendous kick, lurching into an uncontrolled dive. He didn’t want to imagine how little of the ship was still in one piece – not after running that insane gauntlet.

The western bridge doors opened on grumbling hydraulics, showing Cyrion silhouetted by fire in the doorway.

‘Are you mad?’ he voxed. ‘Hurry the hell up.’

Now or never,
thought Talos. He sprinted up the dais to his command throne, needing to hold the armrest to stay on his feet. The melting view on the occulus showed thin clouds, then stars, then the ground, all in an endless, random cycle.

With his free hand, he pulled his sword from its place locked at the throne’s side, and sheathed it on his back.

‘You should be in the drop-pod,’ he voxed back to Cyrion.

‘I wish I was,’ his brother replied. ‘The ship’s backside just fell off.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No engines. No joke. We’re in freefall.’ Cyrion was gripping the door frame, as human crew flooded around him, trying to flee the bridge. ‘Come
on,
’ he urged.

Talos ran to him, keeping his balance despite the humans falling underfoot and the deck seeming to disregard all pretence of physics.

Their swords didn’t stay sheathed for long. As they forced their way through corridors turned thick with the press of panicked human bodies, both blades fell and carved, hewing a way through the living forest. Blood joined the sweat-stink and fear-scent, aching in Talos’s senses. Through the screams, he was dimly aware that he was butchering his own crew, but what did it matter? They’d be dead in moments, anyway.

Cyrion was breathing heavily, kicking out at the humans to break legs and backs as often as he lashed out with his gladius.

‘We’re going to die,’ he breathed over the vox, ‘and it’s your fault for waiting so long.’

Talos cleaved his sword through a mortal’s body, splitting the human from neck to pelvis and shouldering through the falling pieces.

‘You didn’t have to come back just to whine at me.’

‘I didn’t have to, no,’ Cyrion allowed. ‘But no one should die without being reminded of their mistakes.’

‘Where in the infinite hells are you?’
came Mercutian’s voice over the vox.

Talos disembowelled one of the fleeing crew from behind, hurling the biological wreckage aside. He was sweating beneath his armour, already feeling the strain of the endless chopping through the panicked humans blocking the tunnels. A horde of them, hundreds – and soon to be thousands – were fleeing for the escape pods. Exhaustion wasn’t a factor; he could carve all day and all night without rest. The problem was purely one of time.

‘Launch the drop-pod,’ Talos voxed. ‘Mercutian, Uzas, get down to Tsagualsa.’

‘Are you insane?’
Mercutian’s strained reply came back.

‘We’re closer to the command deck’s escape pods. Just go.’

Cyrion pulled his gladius from the spine of a uniformed deck officer, his own breath starting to come through ragged. ‘If there are any escape pods left after these vermin have run away, that is.’