Incarnation - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  She paused and looked back again – the gunship was already darkening, system lights winking out one after another. She thought of saying thank you, but in the end she just nodded and stepped onto the Dionysia.

  ‘That’s it…’ The voice came from the glowing light in front of his eyes. It was somehow both melodic and cold, like a note struck on a scalpel. ‘That’s it, my lord duke, you can wake up now.’

  Cleander tried to say something, but the words clogged.

  ‘I said wake, your grace, not speak. It will take a little longer for the anaesthetics to wear off. They are nerve specific, and your jaw and tongue are low down on the list.’

  The light became sharper. He saw the outline of a head and shoulders bending over him. Something silver glittered as a hand withdrew from beside his neck. More details: crystal-lensed eye implants beneath a bald scalp, cyan and crimson plastek robes, needle-tipped fingers. A chromed servo-skull buzzed above them, probe- and fine manipulator-tipped tentacles hanging beneath it. It dipped closer, gripped his left eyelid with a tiny claw, pulled it wide and flicked a beam of light across his pupil. He tried to turn his head away, but nothing moved. The servitor let go and floated next to the bald figure, and burbled something that might have been words if those words had been spoken by a clockwork toy.

  Iaso… that was the bald figure’s name – Medicae Primus Iaso. She was his chief, and very expensive, medicae attendant on the Dionysia, and this small, bright space with its chemical smell, and the low beep and murmur of subtle machines, must be one of the medicae chambers in the ship’s command levels. He was here because… because…

  ‘I had instructions from the Lady Viola to ensure that she was present when you regained consciousness.’ Iaso looked at him. Her carbuncle eye lenses were like two black pearls reflecting back the image of him lying on a white pallet hung from the ceiling by an articulated piston arm. White cloth and red plastek bindings covered his body. ‘I thought, though, under the circumstances, that it might be better if we talked first. You may have to lie to your sister about it, but your grace is well practised at that.’

  Some of the numbness was leaving his body. He could feel a series of dull aches creeping through his muscles. He tried his jaw and tongue again, and found they moved, though they felt heavy.

  ‘Wh–’ he began, and gagged on the dryness of his mouth. Iaso flicked a hand and the servo-skull buzzed forward and squirted water between his teeth. It tasted metallic. ‘What… What happened?’ he managed.

  ‘A simple question with a complex answer. The simple part is that you suffered an overload to parts of your nervous system and a series of secondary micro-bleeds in your skull, all not helped by the fact that you fell and slammed your patrician face into a console, did superficial damage to your cranium, and gave yourself severe concussion. You have been in an induced coma for the last few days while I dug around inside you and did my best to repair the damage. That’s the simple part.’

  ‘The storm…’ He clamped his eyes shut for a moment. Some of the aches were now becoming sharp pains. ‘The storm as we came out of the warp… the wrecks…’ He felt his still-numb muscles try to jerk him upright. ‘Ghast, what happened to–’

  ‘Void Mistress Ghast is stable, but it will be some time before she is recovered enough for duties.’

  He stopped trying to move, and found that he had just enough movement to give a nod.

  ‘You have performed your duties excellently. I need to return to the bridge. I will ensure that you are reward–’

  ‘But it’s you that is the real question, your grace. You see, my craft is my life and soul, just as it was my father’s and his mother’s and so on, back Terra knows how far. I take it seriously.’

  ‘Under the circumstances, I would find it difficult to believe anything else–’

  ‘I do not allow myself to fail in my duty of care, you understand?’ She had folded her hands over each other and was perfectly still. Only her mouth moved. ‘The indentures and writ that your sister imposed on my employment only enhance that duty. So understand me, Duke von Castellan, when I say my inducing temporary paralysis below your neck is for your good and my obligation to your wellbeing, rather than any order you may give me.’

  He stilled his mind, thoughts suddenly sharp.

  What was this woman? He thought of the rivals and enemies he had made in the decades of plying the void. He thought of the spite of alien lords, and human queens. He thought of all the things and people he had seen serving Covenant, and wondered which of them had sent this creature to infiltrate his ship.

  He tried to move his fingers, to feel if the digital weapons he normally wore as rings were still there.

  ‘Who sent you?’ he croaked, playing for any time he could get.

  Iaso flinched and shook her head.

  ‘You think I mean you harm? Did you not listen – I will do everything to keep you alive and healthy. But you were about to ask me to let you get up and leave this chamber, and I can’t do that.’

  Cleander frowned, puzzled. If she was an assassin she could have killed him already. If she wanted information, this was a strange way of extracting it.

  ‘My sister will demand that you let me leave.’

  ‘Not if it will kill you, and not if you don’t try to leave.’

  ‘Why would trying to leave kill me?’

  Her mouth moved in what might have been a sad smile.

  ‘Simple questions, but I have a feeling all the answers are complicated.’ She shook her head as though trying clear it. ‘And the questions are what I woke you to ask, and the answers… well, they are yours to give.’

  Something in what she had said stopped the whirr of thoughts. A chill spread slowly through him. He closed his eyes for a second, nodding to himself as understanding slid into place.

  So many choices, he thought, so many things done to run the edge of time for just a little longer.

  ‘You said that you went digging around in me.’

  Iaso nodded.

  ‘Yes. And the answer to your earlier questions are that I don’t know what happened with the storm, nor exactly what caused your reaction.’ She paused for a second, and he looked up at her. ‘But I have an idea it might be something to do with the alien technology wrapped around your central nervous system.’

  Severita watched as the servitors uncoupled a set of the cryo-coolant tubes from the side of the casket holding Enna Gyrid. Gas fumed the air in the small chamber for a second. One of the servitors limped to a gauge bolted to the wall behind the casket, and tapped it with a finger, the gesture oddly stiff.

  ‘Temperature rising,’ it droned, and limped back to its fellow next to the banks of hissing machinery at the side of the chamber.

  +Are you sure you must be here for this?+ Mylasa’s thought voice spoke inside Severita’s head. The psyker pivoted slightly, her robes and the toes of her withered feet brushing the floor lightly. A worm of cold light earthed through the gap between her and the floor. +Genuinely, I know that I make you… uncomfortable, and what I am going to do…+

  ‘I stay,’ Severita replied, without looking away from the cryo-casket. Some of the frost had started to melt on the glass view slit. She could see Enna’s closed eyes inside.

  +Very well,+ sent Mylasa, and turned back to the thawing casket. +But I don’t think you are going to find this pleasant to be around.+

  Severita felt static dance up her arm. Worms of green charge began to dance on the decking. Mylasa suddenly seemed slightly indistinct, as though Severita was looking at her through a fine sheet of falling water. A halo of cold light was building around the psyker’s head. Severita braced herself. A jagged cord of light speared out of Mylasa and poured into the casket. In the second before she forced it out of her head, Severita thought she saw an image of a bird with bright green plumage flash across her thoughts and plunge down into a dark sea under a silver moon.

  Viola waited for the inner door of the infirmary airlock to open. Gas billowe
d from the ceiling. It felt cold and smelled of chemicals. For a second, surrounded by the fog, she let the exhaustion creep onto her face. She winced, rubbing her palms across her eyes. She wore a fresh uniform – a blue velvet officer’s coat over a cream silk waistcoat – but the freshness and composure was an act of will.

  They were hanging in the void, blind to what was happening on the surface. She had her orders from Covenant to hold in place, and that is what she was doing, but as the storms closed in – real and etheric – it seemed like sitting and waiting for disaster to come to them. Actually, that was exactly what they were doing, and they were doing it deliberately – something dark was rising and they had come to meet it.

  The chem-fog cleared. As the inner airlock door opened, Viola had her features recomposed into a picture of perfect control.

  ‘Mistress Viola,’ said Iaso. The medicae primus was waiting just inside the chamber. Viola’s eyes went to the frame that her brother lay on. His eyes were closed, and a crisp white sheet covered him to his neck. Servo-skulls hovered close to him, and a host of tubes and cables led from beneath the sheet to steel and glass machines that hissed and bubbled like old men drowning in their own phlegm. He was still, though, chest barely moving.

  ‘Has he regained consciousness?’ asked Viola.

  ‘You gave orders that you were to be informed if he had,’ said Iaso, crisply.

  Viola nodded, still looking at her brother.

  ‘He never wanted it, you know,’ she said, and immediately wondered why.

  ‘But that did not stop him taking it,’ said Iaso. Viola shot her a hard look.

  ‘My apologies, Lady Viola. It was an inappropriate observation.’

  Viola shook her head.

  ‘But an accurate one. You were not with us then, of course, but when we were riding high, I wondered if he knew how to stop.’

  ‘A family trait, perhaps.’

  Viola shot the medicae another look.

  ‘My apologies again, but I can’t unsee what I see. I don’t know what the savants of your clan did to you or the exact pressures of your position, but I can see that you are suffering from acute mental fatigue, and that the cocktail of stimulants in your blood is doing a good job of stopping you falling over, but that is a delicate balance to hold.’

  ‘You know the first xenos race he made contact with nearly killed him. He barely got away alive, and the profits barely covered the losses. That was how he lost his eye. Refused to have it replaced. But I have never seen him more alive. He had found something.

  ‘And from then there was no way back, not for him. There were other ways to reverse our fortunes… Many other ways. But from then the stakes just went up, and up. In the end, when we started to lose, the only thing he was going to do was risk what was left on the longest odds he could find. It was freedom I think, the only freedom he ever really had – the freedom to throw the dice and wait for them to fall.’

  She gave a snort of humourless laughter.

  ‘I know that sounds strange. How can someone with so many choices and so much wealth not be free? But chains are real if they are all you can see.’

  She blinked, shook herself, realising that she had said more than she intended.

  ‘If I may say, my lady, realising that it may overstep boundaries of familiarity… I wonder why you would follow him and help him on such a path?’

  Viola did not answer, but looked back at where her brother lay.

  ‘Will he recover?’

  Iaso turned her head slowly to look at Cleander, and then back to Viola. Her face was unreadable, as if she had been asked the time.

  ‘It is possible.’

  +Retrace your steps.+

  There were hands on Enna’s head, on the back of her head. Pushing her down. Holding her down. The water was in her mouth. In her lungs.

  Air.

  Please, air.

  And the air was streaming into her in silent gasps that were the beginning of drowning.

  Her head pulled, and the surface of the water exploded to a flat black mirror.

  Time was flowing backwards.

  A mirror face looked up at her. She looked down at it.

  And the mask of rags dropped over her head.

  ‘Revelation…’ came the hiss of voices around her, like a promise.

  +Retrace your steps.+

  ‘This way,’ said Idris, as the door closed. ‘Keep close.’

  The corridor sucked her back down towards the dark of her sleep.

  The sounds of their feet on the grey marble floor were gunshots in the quiet. The candles lining the walls were dark and unlit.

  Idris was in front of her. Layers of black silk swirled around her. Pearl-tipped pins held the piled curls of her hair above her head.

  ‘I have been looking for you for a very long time,’ said Idris.

  At the end of the corridor behind them a candle in the open cell door snuffed out.

  Darkness embraced them.

  She folded down onto a bed in a small cell, and slid back to the point between sleep and waking.

  Idris was standing above her, looking down. She had a candle in her hand.

  ‘Revelation…’ said Idris softly. ‘Wake…’

  +Retrace your steps.+

  The door closed.

  ‘Why?’ she called out.

  The man turned and walked to the door. His red cloak brushed the floor.

  ‘For everyone,’ he said.

  ‘For who?’

  ‘It is best,’ he said.

  His eyes met hers.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Why am I here, my lord?’

  There were flecks of grey in his beard, she noticed. He looked behind him, at the cell door, where a figure in pale robes stood, its face veiled.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said.

  BETWEEN YOUR SERVANT AND HARM

  Acia crouched in the space between the bases of the statues. Looking out she could see just the dark, flat and black at the end of the narrow space she had crawled through. Everything was quiet, the echoing quiet that she did not like. But that meant that she would be able to hear the footsteps of anyone coming close. No one had come past her hiding place since she had dowsed the torch lighting the passage beyond and wriggled into the bolthole.

  The monastery was filled with places like this, places that were as quiet and still as the pilgrim holes were bustling and loud. She had found others like them the few times when grandfather had come in from the drift and fallen asleep in a shrine nook. She had gone looking into the quiet places then, and found that there were more of them than people thought. Passages filled with dust and darkness, chambers where statues looked down from behind cobweb veils. Stairwells behind doors whose hinges could barely move for rust.

  She had wondered why the pilgrims did not come to those places. They would be better than the creaking refuse hovels that were the drift. If they took places like the Palace of Pillars, then why not these smaller pockets of nothing? After a while of padding through the shadows, she had realised why – they didn’t know they were there.

  Now, squeezed into the dark between two statues, she hoped that no one knew that this place was there.

  She heard a sound like a boot on stone. Close.

  She held her breath. Had they followed her up the long spiral of stairs? Had they found the door that led to this chamber?

  They had seen her. She knew they had. They had seen her. As she ran from the Palace of Pillars there had been eyes that had seen her, voices that had called out.

  ‘Witch!’

  She had run, and run, and found a space in the quiet dark and prayed to the God-Emperor just like she had been taught.

  ‘Witch…’

  And now she was hearing footsteps, clear now, and coming closer.

  ‘Witch…’

  The breath was burning in her lungs. The steps stopped just at the end of the space she had squeezed into. She could hear breathing, heavy and wheezing. There was a smell too,
like… iron, or meat before it was cooked, and something whispering and black was coiling up out of her thoughts. She thought of what she had opened her eyes to in the Palace of Pillars. Scorched. Torn. Tattered. And the heavy, sticky drip-drip that was the only sound in the vast space.

  Her lungs were filling with pain. The old prayer went around and around her thoughts faster and faster, as the time went on and on.

  God-Emperor, who protects all, hear this prayer, and stand between Your servant and harm…

  A sound of feet shifting on the stone, turning.

  God-Emperor, who protects all, hear this prayer, and stand between Your servant and harm…

  A grunt of breath, so close that she imagined she could feel it.

  God-Emperor, who protects all, hear this prayer, and stand between Your servant and harm…

  A last grunt of resignation, and then the sound of feet on stone was going away. When there was just silence, Acia gasped in gulps of air. Only after several minutes did she stop, and then the tears came, falling silently in the dark, as the only prayer she remembered faded from her mind.

  NINE

  Snow was spiralling through the open side door of the gunship as it banked around the monastery spires. The whole frame was pitching and yawing. The wind was a gale. Josef could see the wing lights of the other craft dancing as they fought the wind.

  ‘Sir, we are coming up on the target.’ The pilot’s voice was loud over the vox – it was the only way to hear anyone over the sound of the engines and the wind. ‘Atmospheric conditions are deteriorating. If we set down then we won’t be able to get airborne again.’

  ‘Hover, drop and pull away,’ said Josef without pausing. ‘Hold steady for fire support or extraction.’ Mission command was his as Covenant’s proxy. He had never worked directly with arbitrator units in this way, but command was like an old robe for him, so familiar that it just settled onto his shoulders without a crease.

  ‘Confirmed,’ said the pilot.

  Josef switched the vox to broadcast through the squadron.

  ‘All units stand by,’ he said. ‘Mission parameter is to find out what has happened. Hostility levels unknown, but presume that there is something that will try to kill us.’