by John French
Advance.+
Ahriman paused, his mind unsure of what it had just heard. For a moment while Maroth had spoken, he had thought he had heard another voice whisper in his thoughts. For a moment, he thought it had told him to turn back.
Horkos!+ The thought shouted into his mind.
It will be done,+ replied Ahriman. A crude thought form of contempt and disgust was Maroth’s only reply.
Ahriman did not give the order to the warriors with him; they were already scrambling over debris towards half-glimpsed doorways. He remembered the mind whisper telling him to turn back. Ahriman shook his head and ran after the howls of the pack.
Carmenta stopped running. The beast turned its head towards her. Its shoulders bunched and she saw muscle gather across the ribs of its torso. The doors to the bridge waited in the distance, at the far end of the half-kilometre-long antechamber. She had been running towards the doors when the beast had walked out in front of her. It had paced slowly into the centre of the chamber, broken chains rattling behind it.
Where its face should have been, a blank plate of metal stared at her. A spiked iron collar circled its neck. It straightened to twice her height. Tattoos writhed across its body, changing shape and colour. Her vision pixellated as she looked at the patterns. The beast’s body began to quiver. Carmenta thought that it looked as if it were trying to scream.
It brought a shaking limb up to its masked face. Its hand opened with a clatter of sharp edges. Slowly, almost delicately, it pulled its clawed fingers down its faceplate. Deep scratches wept blood. Carmenta glanced behind her. She could see other figures sprinting down the wide passage towards them. Guttural howls filled the air as gunfire lit the long chamber. Explosions blossomed on the deck by her feet. She felt shrapnel patter off the metal of her limbs.
She looked back at the beast. In her mind, something changed. She felt suddenly calm, rational, as if the panic of before had belonged to another person. This was it. It was over, finally. She would not reach the bridge. She heard a cry inside her to keep running, to reach her ship, to reach her child. Part of her was screaming at herself, cursing herself for weakness, but she remained still. It was as if the panicked need to reunite with the ship belonged to someone else, as if a door in her mind had closed on the voice of another mind trapped within. Listening to the shouts inside half of her skull, she felt relief that it was all over, that she would be free of the Titan Child at last.
The beast charged. It made no sound, but she imagined it howling as its steps sang on the metal floor.
You have killed us, said a voice in her head. She felt her arms trembling. She could feel something within her willing her feet to run. She held still. You have killed us both, screamed the voice.
No, she thought to herself. I will be free now. She drew a breath to speak. Her voice was one of the few things she had never wanted replaced by machine components. Her father had said she had a beautiful voice. It was the only thing she could remember him saying.
‘Thank you,’ she said to the beast as it charged to meet her.
Lightning struck the beast as it reached for Carmenta. It touched the tips of the beast’s fingers and leapt up its arm. The beast stumbled, caged in jagged lines so bright that Carmenta’s eyes had to dim to near blackness. Its skin blistered and peeled. Its metal mask glowed, flesh cooking around its edge. It swung its arms as if trying to swat away a swarm of stinging insects. Three explosive shells hit it at the same moment and pulled the muscle from its torso. The next volley hammered through its faceplate and turned its head to bone splinters and red vapour. It collapsed, its muscles shivering to stillness as its blood spread.
She looked to her side where a passage mouth opened. Astraeos was striding towards her, his three brothers following in his wake. Glowing cables and crystal nodes haloed his face. Frost covered the shoulders of his armour and ran down his arm to the tip of his sword. His brothers were still firing, hammering volleys into figures approaching across the chamber. She could see fatigue on his blunt face, and the drop of blood crusting at the corner of his mouth. He was muttering. A veil of cold light shimmered in front of him. Beside Astraeos his brothers had locked into firing postures, lacing the approach with bolter fire.
‘Go,’ called Astraeos. Fatigue and effort edged his voice. She looked to him; his eyes remained on the spectral veil of energy at the tip of his sword and the closing shapes beyond.
She thought of his face when she had first seen it: coated in ice, the aura of the stasis field leaching all colour from his skin. It had been an impulse to take the survivors from the wreck of their ship, and a risk to release them. They could have tried to take the ship from her, but Astraeos and his three brothers had rewarded her whim with an oath. She never asked what doom they fled from, and they had kept their oath. In her life it was one of the few promises to her that remained unbroken.
‘Go,’ shouted Astraeos again. ‘There are others coming. I can sense them getting closer. If you cannot do something, then there is no way out of this.’
She felt her mouth open to say that it was over, that there was no way back. Then her vision fizzed with static and a screaming wave of panic flooded her mind.
I cannot fail, she thought. I will not let us die. Not now. Somewhere behind the rolling wave of emotion another voice cried in denied anger. She did not listen to it. She began to run towards the bridge.
Something struck Ahriman’s shoulder and exploded. He was falling, his head filled with a high-pitched whine. His armour rang as he hit the floor. The helmet systems cut out, leaving him in darkness with the sound of his own breath. He could feel blood, thick and sticky, rolling down the inside of his right arm. Sound crackled in his ear and the noise of the battle returned. Somewhere close to him Karoz was howling. There was another burst of fire, a familiar sound of a serrated stream of detonations.
Bolt-rounds. Ahriman extended his mind, and felt the psyches of their attackers burning like an iron-shackled sun. Space Marines, he thought. Not the Harrowing, but the minds of true Space Marines. Maroth has his wish; I will die here.
And why not let it end here? He had fled and hidden, falling into darkness for a lifetime since his banishment, and for what? He had nothing beside the dust of his ideals, and the shell of his life. He should have let himself fade to nothing long before now.
I am fate, come round at last. The words echoed in his mind, and he suddenly felt cold, as if he had looked into a dark doorway and seen eyes staring back.
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