by Dan Abnett
'I will not/
'And if you "remember" anything else…'
'I will tell you at once/
Tobius/ I paused. 'You say the voyage of the Promethean was long and fruitless, and the crewmembers were tormented by the beings they eventually encountered. Do you not have misgivings about returning there?'
'Of course.' He smiled a thin smile. 'But I am bound to serve you as an agent of the Emperor, and I will do so without question. Besides, part of me is curious.'
'Curious?'
'I want to see these sarathi with my own eyes.'
I should mention the dreams.
They did not over-trouble me during the voyage, but still they lingered, every few days or so. I seldom dreamed specifically of the blank-eyed, handsome man, but he lurked obliquely in other dreams, a bystander, looking on, observing, never speaking.
The lightning flashes escorted him, closer in each dream.
At ship-dawn of the third day of the twenty-ninth week, I rose silently and left my quarters, heading down towards the hold area where Pontius was secured. It was a good four hours until our daily conversation was due to start.
I climbed into a service duct adjoining the hold space, and crawled down until I reached a circulation grille that looking down into the hold itself.
There was frost on the grille.
Below, a figure crouched by the casket, huddled in robes, lit only by a hand-lamp. The overhead lights were not on.
Pontius was awake. The frost told me that much, and I could see the tiny flashes of firing synapses and hear the low hiss of his voice.
Tell me of the Border Wars, the ones you mentioned last time. Imperial losses were great, you said?'
'I tell you much and you tell me little back/ replied the figure. 'That was not our agreement. I said I would secretly help you if you helped me. Power, Pontius, information. If you want me to act as your emissary, I need a show of trust. How can I communicate your will to your allies, if I know nothing of the "true matter"?'
A pause.
'What is this about?' the figure asked. What is at stake, what thing of great value?'
Another pause.
'You should go before they discover you. Eisenhorn is becoming suspicious/
Tell me, Pontius. We're nearly there, just a few days to go. Tell me so I can help you/
'I… will tell you. The Necroteuch. That is what we are after, Alizebeth/
EIGHTEEN
KCX-1288 by the light of the quill-star. Into the Wound. The wrongness.
On the first day of the thirty-first week, just under a day outside Maxilla's estimate, the Essene burst back into realspace deep inside the system designated KCX-1288. Almost at once we were in danger.
The local star was a vast, swollen fireball pulsing and retching out its last few millions years of life. Distended and no longer spherical, it glowed with a malevolent pink fire beneath a cooling crust of black shreds and tatters that looked like rot infecting its granular skin. Firestorms swirled and blistered across its enlarged surface and vomited gouts of stellar matter out into the system. An immense column of excreting gas and matter plumed away from the behemoth star, almost a light year long. It looked like a huge, luminous quill stabbed into the soft ball of that sun.
From the moment of our arrival at the translation point, sirens and alarms began shrilling on the bridge. External radiation levels were almost immeasurable, and we shuddered and rocked through waves of searing star debris. The entire system was lousy with drifting radioactive banks, ash clouds, flares and the splinters of matter they projected, and magnetic anomalies. Our shields were full on and already we were taking damage.
Maxilla said nothing, but furrowed his brow in concentration as he steered the juddering ship in through the treacherous course, negotiating the gravity pools and radioactive undertows.
'It's falling apart/ said Aemos, awed, gazing at the main projection screen and the furiously scrolling bars of data that flickered across it. The whole damn system is in a state of collapse.'
'Any sign of them?' I called to Maxilla.
'We must be right on their tail. They were half a day ahead of us, no more. Damn this interference. Wait-'
What?'
He said something I couldn't hear over the cacophony.
'Say again!'
Maxilla cancelled the screaming sirens. The juddering and shaking continued, and now we could hear the groaning and creaking of the Essene's hull under stress. He pointed to the pict-plate that overviewed the Essene's sensor operations.
'I'm picking up their drive-wake and gravitational displacement, but in these conditions it's getting really hard to read them with accuracy. There-' He tapped a gloved finger on the plate. That's undoubtedly a drive-wake, but how do you explain it?'
I shook my head. I'm no mariner.
They've split/ said Midas, looking over our shoulders. The main portion has fallen back, maybe out of the system itself to a safe distance, and a smaller, core group has continued on in. Maybe five ships, six at most/
That's how I read it too/ Maxilla agreed. 'A fleet division. I'd guess they didn't want to risk sending their biggest ships into this maelstrom/
'I can see why/ murmured Bequin, gazing at the seething turmoil on the main display.
'Forget about the ones that have withdrawn. Follow the lead group in/ I said.
'I would advise-' Maxilla began.
'Do it!'
With the aid of his navigational servitors, he adjusted the Essene's trajectory and set on after the drive-wake of the smaller group, driving in system.
There! There, look!' Maxilla called out suddenly, adjusting a secondary display unit to magnify and enhance an image. It was distant, but we could see the burst-open hulk of an Imperial cruiser drifting in a halo of slowly dissipating energy.
'Definitely one of Estrum's ships. Holed by meteor storms. They ran into trouble the moment they pressed on/
The Essene shook again.
What about us?' I asked.
Maxilla conferred with Betancore. There was a particularly violent shudder and the main lights went out for a second.
'We need shelter/ Maxilla told me frankly.
As far as the Essene's bewildered and over-taxed sensors could establish, there were fifteen planets in the system, as well as millions of planetoid fragments, mostly ragged embers of wasted rock and venting energy. Our
quarry's drive wake led directly to the third largest, one of the inner worlds. It was a scabby, ruined, semi-shattered ball with lingering swathes of swirling bluish atmosphere. Craters covered its northern hemisphere-some impacts had been so large that they had torn open the mantle and exposed the livid red core beneath, like a skull cracked with devastating wounds. Even as we watched, we saw scatters of light dot and blossom across the surface as meteors struck and incinerated continents far below.
We tore in through the convulsing fabric of space, past moons of blood and striated mackerel clouds of dust. A vast sheet of stellar fire swept out at us, throwing the ship wildly off course and hurling silver lumps of rock and ice against our shields.
'Madness!' cried Fischig. They wouldn't have come here! It's death!'
Maxilla looked at me, as if hoping I'd agree with the chastener and call us off for the sake of the Essene.Той are sure of their traces?'
Maxilla, his hands flexing on the controls, swallowed and nodded.
'Get us down there, into whatever shelter the planet's bulk can give us. At least let's confirm their corpses before we leave/
Descent took twenty minutes, none of them smooth and none of them guaranteeing a sequel. I wanted to use the time to get Lowink or Maxilla's astropaths to check on the approach of the task force from Gudrun that had set out, on my instructions thirty weeks ago, to rendezvous with us here.
But it was impossible. The stellar distortion rendered astrotelepathy blind.
I cursed.
We went in steeply, down towards the dark side of the wounded planet.
Blooms of fire consumed crater-pocked landmasses in the darkness below and ammoniacal storms raged in oceanic measures. Even here, with the planet between us and the convulsing sun, the ride was hard and rough. We saw, for a second as we passed, another ship ruin, another of Estrum's fleet splintered and destroyed. A death world; a death system.
'Our enemies must have made a mistake/ said Aemos, holding on to the edge of a console to steady himself. The saruthi can't be here. If they ever inhabited this system, they must have long since abandoned it/
Yet/ I countered, 'the heretic fleet's advance group presses on with great determination and purpose/
The Essene continued to descend, closer than it would normally come to a planetary body. Only ribbons of atmosphere remained, and Maxilla clung to the ragged surface, passing barely ten kilometres above the bare rock. Drizzles of shooting stars rained past us.
What's that?' I asked.
Maxilla adjusted his sensors and the resolution of the display. A huge wound in the planet's crust yawned before us, a thousand kilometres wide; a cliff-like lip of impact-raised rock with a vast cavity beneath.
The sensors can't resolve it. Is that meteor damage?'
'Perhaps, from an angled strike/ said Aemos.
'Did they go past or in?' I asked.
'In?' barked Maxilla, incredulously.
'In! Did they go in?'
Aemos was leaning over the servitor at the sensor station. 'The drive wake ebbs and disappears here. Either they were vaporised en masse at this point or they indeed went inside/
I looked at Maxilla. The Essene bucked again, thrown by a gravity pool, and the bridge lights went out briefly for a second time.
'This is a star-going ship/ he said softly, 'not built for surface landing/
'I know that/ I replied. 'But neither were theirs. They have more information than we do… and they have gone inside/
Shaking his head, Maxilla turned the Essene down towards the vast wound.
The rift cavity was dark, and limitless according to the sensors, though in my opinion, the sensors were no better than useless now. A dull red glow suffused the darkness far below us. The violent shaking had stopped, but still the hull creaked and protested at the gravitational stress.
We had the sudden impression of moving through some structure, then another, then a third. The display revealed the fourth before we passed under it: an angular hoop or arch eighty kilometres across. Beyond it, more in the series, towering around us as we progressed, as if we were passing down the middle of a giant rib-cage.
'They're octagonal/ said Aemos.
And irregular/1 added.
No two of the rib-arches were the same, but they displayed the same form and lack of symmetry as their companions – the shape we now instantly associated with the sarathi.
These can't be natural/ said Maxilla.
We continued in under the cyclopean spans, passing through a dozen, then a dozen more.
'Light sources ahead/ a servitor announced.
A dull, greenish glow fogged into being far away down the avenue of octagonal arches.
'Do we continue?' asked Maxilla.
I nodded. 'Send a marker drone back to the surface/
A moment later, the rear display showed a small servitor drone straggling back up the vast channel towards the surface, running lights winking.
We ran on past the last arch. There was another judder.
Then we were riding clear into light, smooth, pale, green light.
There seemed to be no roof or ceiling to whatever we were in, though inside the planetary cavity we undoubtedly were. Just hazy green light, and below, a carpet of wispy cloud.
All turbulence stopped. We were like a ship becalmed.
* * *
The atmosphere in this place – logic battled to make us remember we were inside the crust of a planet – was thin and inert, a vaguely ammoniacal vapour. None of us could explain the source of the pervasive luminescence or the fact that the Essene sat comfortably at grav anchor in the serene quiet. As Maxilla had pointed out, it was not a trans-atmospheric vessel and it should have been impossible to stabilise it this close to a planetary body without severe stress damage.
From its system registers, the Essene seemed happy enough, happy to have ridden out the vile stellar storms of KCX-1288 into this safe harbour.
Apart from minor impact damage, only two of the ship's systems were inoperative. The sensors were blind and giving back nothing but odd, dead echoes. And every chronometer on the ship had stopped, except two that were running backwards.
Betancore and Maxilla studied the imperfect returns of the sensor arrays and concluded land of some sort lay beneath us, under the cloudbank. We estimated that it was six kilometres straight down, though in this vague, hazy rift it was difficult to say.
If Glaw's heretics were here, they had left no trace. But with our sensors so badly occluded, their advance fleet could be anchored just on the other side of the clouds.
We dropped to the cloudbank from the Essene in the gun-cutter shortly afterwards. All of us had buckled on hard-armour vacuum suits from Maxilla's lockers. Lowink, Fischig, Aemos and I shambled about the crew bay, getting used to the heavy plate and bulky quilting of the suits.
Bequin was in the cockpit with Betancore, watching him take us down. The pair of them wore borrowed vacuum suits too, and she was pinning up her hair so it would not interfere with the helmet seal.
'Good hunting, inquisitor/ crackled Maxilla from the Essene above us.
'He'll be down there, won't he?' asked Bequin, and I knew she was referring to Mandragore.
'It's likely. Him… and whatever this is all about/
'Well, you heard what Pontius said/ she replied.
How could I not have? The Necroteuch. One doesn't hear a word like that and forget it. It had taken her weeks to gain the confidence of our bodiless prisoner, to play the part of a disaffected traitor. I hadn't been sure she was up to it, but she had performed with patience and a finely gauged measure of play-acting. It had been a risk, letting her slip in to see Pontius alone. She had assured me she could do it and she had not been wrong.
The Necroteuch. If Pontius Glaw was telling the truth, our enterprise had even greater urgency now. I had wondered what could be so precious, so important as to galvanise our enemies so, make them risk so much. I had my answer. Legend said the last extant copy of that abominable work had been destroyed millennia before. Except that by some means, in antique ages past, a copy had come into the hands of the
saruthi race. And now they were preparing to trade it back to Glaw's Imperial heretics.
We came down through the clouds and saw the land below, a wide, rolling expanse of dust sweeping down to what seemed to be a sea. Liquid frothed and broke along a curved shoreline a hundred kilometres long. Everything was a shade of pale green, bathed by the radiance that glowed through the wispy clouds. There was a misty softness to it all, a lack of sharp focus. It seemed endless, toneless, slow. There was a calm, ethereal feel that was at once soothing and unnerving. Even the lapping sea seemed languid. It reminded me of the seacoast at Tralito, on Caelun Two, where I had spent a summer recuperating from injuries years before. Endless leagues of mica dunes, the slow sea, the balmy, hazy air.
'How big?' I asked Midas.
'Is what?' he asked.
This… place.'
He pointed to the instruments. 'Can't say. A hundred kilometres, two… three… a thousand.'
"You must have something!'
He looked round at me with a smile that had worry in it. 'Systems say it's endless. Which is, of course, impossible. So I think the instruments are out. I'm not trusting them, anyway.'
Then what are you flying by?'
'My eye – or the seat of my pants. Whichever you find most reassuring.'
We followed the slow curve of the endless bay for about ten minutes. At last, details emerged to break up the uniform anonymity.
A row of arches, octagonal, jutt
ing from the sand a few hundred metres back from the waterline, ran parallel to the water. They were each about fifty metres broad, in everything but scale the twins of the arches Maxilla had guided the Essene through. They extended away as far as we could see in the green haze.
'Set us down.'
We sat the gun-cutter on the soft dusty-sand half a kilometre from the shore, clamped on our helmets and ventured out.
The radiance was greater than I had expected – the cutter's ports had been tinted – and we slid down brown-glass over-visors against the glare.
I hate vacuum suits. The sense of being muffled and constrained, the ponderous movement, the sound of my own breath in my ears, the sporadic click of the intercom. The suit shut out all sounds from outside, except the crunch of my feet on the fine, dry sand.
We shuffled down to the water's edge in a wide file. All of us except Aemos carried weapons.
It looked like a sea. Green water, showing white at the breakers.
'Liquid ammonia/ Aemos said, his voice a low crackle over the vox.
There was something strange about it.
'Do you see it?' he asked me.
What?'
'The waves are moving out from the shore.'
I looked again. It was so obvious, I had missed it. The liquid wasn't rushing in and breaking, it was sucking away from the shore and rolling back into itself.
It was chilling. So simple. So wrong. My confidence withered. I wanted to strip off the claustrophobic suit and cry out. And I would have, except for the stark red warning lights on the atmosphere reader built into my suit's bulky left cuff.
What was it Maxilla had said? The saruthi had tormented the men of the Promethean? I didn't know for a moment if the unnatural behaviour of the sea was their doing – how could it have been? But I understood how insidious, distressing torment might have played upon them.
Fischig and Betancore had approached the first of the arches. I looked across and saw them dwarfed by the unsymmetrical structure. The next in the line was three hundred metres away, and they seemed regularly spaced. Each one, as far as I could see, was irregular in a different way, though the size and proportions were identical.
Bequin was kneeling on the shoreline, brushing the sand aside gently with her gauntlet. She had found what was perhaps the most distressing detail so far.