That helped her feel better about having faked them out and slipped away to Galata to hold the hearing. But not so much better that she wasn’t spending more time than she should have running through her analysts’ latest reports on the Simova claim and muttering the Guilliman proverb to herself over and over.
For a moment she wondered what the shape blotting out the left side of her vision was, then she realised to her embarrassment that it was her hand. It had crept up to run a fingernail down the scar-lines on her forehead. She put it down, feeling the twinge in her shoulder: she had fallen behind on the exercises she was supposed to do to keep it limber.
“Ma’am, one more message, and then I’ll go and check on those dock-security protocols you asked me to look at. A reply from Genetor-Magos Sanja. It begins with the same formalities as the last one, and—”
“I’ll take your word for the phrasing and the formalities. Is he telling us anything we wanted to know?”
“No. Uhm, he makes it pretty clear that he’s not going to, either. He repeats what he said after that first blood specimen went to him. Circumstances which he may not reveal have placed the Helispex Engine beyond the reach of these proceedings, but the oaths and duties of his office prevent him from explaining why. He also says that he’s empowered to offer some kind of compensating obligation by the shrine and will meet with you to discuss this, but not for ten days from the sealing of that message which was about an hour ago.”
“And an explanation of why exactly the Helispex Engine is unavailable for the first time in thousands of years?”
“No ma’am.”
“An explanation of what happened to that blood sample from this heir who came in with the flotilla?”
“Nothing, ma’am.”
“A clue as to what’s going to happen to this second blood sample from Varro Phrax, which is apparently coming in on a dromon from the Higher Tetrajin Gate?”
“No clue at all.”
“And I suppose I don’t even need to ask what he says about the tech-priest from the flotilla who went marching into his shrine with the heir’s blood and hasn’t been seen since.”
“Indeed, ma’am, you do not.”
“What do you think happened, Culann?”
“I couldn’t say, ma’am, I’ve been with you the whole time.”
“I was being serious, though,” she said, turning those green eyes on him. “I’m interested in hearing it. I like to know how my colleagues’ minds work. Go on.”
“Something happened, ma’am.”
“Oh?”
“The Mechanicus are zealous about their privacy and their mystique. If something had happened to the Helispex there’s no way any of them would come out and say so even to many people inside their own order, given the disgrace it would mean to Sanja as its custodian. I don’t think it’s because of that trip out to Trylan. He was worrying about what effect travel and non-consecrated ground was going to have on it, but I don’t think the engine itself left Bosporian. I think something happened after he got back, maybe related to the flotilla cogboy, sorry ma’am, tech-priest going there to visit him. Unless he left by some way we don’t know about.”
“We have a pretty good idea what goes on around most of the Augustaeum, Culann, and I’m as confident as I can be that the only way out of that shrine is through the main doors. Me, I think Dyobann is dead, either because he had something to do with why the Helispex is unavailable, or because he found out something about it and the other adepts killed him for it. I’m fairly well-disposed towards Genetor-Magos Sanja, but I have no illusions about what he might be capable of if he gets his blood up. Did I tell you about the Mechanicus cell we had to deal with on Don-Croix?”
“No, ma’am. But your thoughts about what happened to Dyobann match mine.”
“They do? Then you should have said so, Culann. Candour between an Arbitor Senioris and her staff is important. I need to know I’m getting every thought that passes through your mind.”
“Yes ma’am,” said Culann, standing at attention, his spine vibrating with pride.
“Alright, then. Go and check those protocols. There apparently are appalling warp storms between here and Santo Pevrelyi and it’s holding up the heir’s ship. The other one, that is. But meanwhile, I have to go and announce that the blood vial of Varro Phrax that this emissary brought through those storms is actually of no use now. I’m sure he’ll enjoy hearing that. Apparently the passage here is not one to wish on your worst enemy at the moment.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Sanctioned Liner Gann-Luctis,
in transit
“You’re staying back here,” said Domasa Dorel. “Cherrick, get in front of him.” She would have blocked the way herself, but the hellish storm outside the hull meant that too much of her strength was spent keeping herself upright and her thoughts her own. There was thick, migranous pressure on her temples, and the flashes of power against the Geller field showed in her warp eye like a flash of red through closed eyelids. She sagged against the plain metal wall of the crew-deck.
“No ma’am,” said Cherrick and, after the initial disbelief Domasa’s burst of anger on top of what was already in her head made her dizzy. “All available able-bodied hands have been ordered to hunt this thing down,” he went on. “One of the oldest shipboard disciplines there is.” Cherrick eyed Varro and Rikah’s short-barrelled lasguns as he spoke, his words underlined by the clanging alarms in the corridors around them.
“And you’re not going to order me away from this, Madam Dorel.” Varro put in. Behind him the mini-squad of the Gann-Luctis’ troopers muttered and looked at each other. “I left my son in my wife’s arms eight decks above us. Believe me when I say I’d rather be with them than here. But Cherrick’s right, this is an obligation.”
“You’re the heir,” said Domasa, but with little spirit. She hadn’t the energy. “Anything happens to you, the whole point of the voyage gets flushed. Won’t that be nice?” A dozen ratings, white-faced and gasping along to a prayer their overseer was chanting, clattered by, heading down the ramp behind Varro. They mostly clutched ships’ tools to fight with: oxy-torches, heavy wrenches or tool-hafts, buzzblades on heavy forearm mountings. For all the good it would do them.
“It’s an obligation.” Varro repeated. He was pale with fear, but there was no give in his voice at all. “That’s all. Now if you’re coming with us, Domasa, then let someone help you. Otherwise we’ll see you to somewhere safe.”
“Nowhere is safe at the moment,” she said, and as if on cue there was a momentary shudder as the ship bucked in the warp flow faster and harder than the gravity plates in the deck could smooth out. The tremor boomed through the dim halls all around them: where they stood, at the intersection of four great fifth-deck thoroughfares, it was like muffled thunder welling out of the darkness on every side at once.
“You’re right,” said Rikah, “and as long as this thing is loose inside the hull we’re less safe than ever. And we’re still standing here talking.” He tilted his silver-frilled head towards the ramp down to the second-order crew-decks. “Let’s not allow it any more time, shall we?”
Cherrick nodded with grudging respect, wheeled and strode to where the ship’s soldiers, overhearing them, were going over their weapons once again. Most wore bulbous combat bridles holding the targeting visors over their eyes, vox pickups at their jaws, and dangling amulets and purity seals at their temples; their faces, what could be seen through all the hardware, were grim. Cherrick knew they had been trained and conditioned to trust in one another, and having to follow him and Domasa around was galling. Cherrick himself was no better off: distrust of anyone but his own handpicked people was ingrained so deeply in him that he had insisted on having at least one of his own troops at a dozen strategic points across the ship. He was feeling their absence now, though, and he muttered obscenities under his breath as they readied themselves to move.
“Can somebody tell me,” slurred Domasa as she leant on R
ikah’s arm, “why we all have to club together like this? I thought it was only bad melodramas where any dangerous mission required all the most irreplaceable members of the crew to gang up.” The ship lurched again and a tight, coherent current of warpstuff scraped down the side of the Geller field. Rikah and two of the ship’s troops jumped and looked around as though they had heard a voice calling to them, and strange transparent spots danced in Domasa’s vision.
“We’re not leaving.” Rikah countered by reflex, and then calmed himself. “Varro and I are here because we’re able-bodied personnel and we’re obligated to do what we can to defend the ship. The troopers are here for the same reason. Cherrick, well, I suppose he’s here because he’s the chief of your staff and he’s responsible for you, but you, Domasa, if there’s anyone here who should be somewhere safer—”
“She’s here because she’s our bloodhound this evening,” called Cherrick over his shoulder. “Except with an eye in her head instead of a nose on her face. So to speak. She’s how we knew to follow the thing down here.”
“What it is.” Domasa condescended to put a little more weight on Rikah’s arm as she spoke, “is… like a little, thing. A piece of what’s out there all bundled up with what’s in here.” She swallowed as the ship bucked and the internal gravity lurched for a sickening moment. She wasn’t sure, but she thought they might just have been tossed end over end. “It’s like… little fine threads working their way in, then being tied into a knot. Or something from outside seeping in and then crystallising in here. Or something from outside spurting its seed in, which grew into something in here. All of those things and none of them, I can’t… Ahhh—”
Two murder-black whirlpools of force had merged right on the ship, and the force of them wanted to wring it like a yard-fowl’s neck. Every man on the deck around Domasa felt his skin crawl. Cherrick was suddenly caught in the memory of his first kill and realised that he was a murderer. Varro remembered the first time he had truly feared for his son’s life, in a watercarriage crash on Gunarvo’s canals. Domasa thought nothing at all, the thoughts chased from her mind by bursts of filthy urine-yellow light, hot and sour as old hatred.
“Are you alright?” asked Rikah as he gripped her arm. A tiny drop of blood trickled down from his nostril. “Can you stand?” Domasa muttered something. “I’m sorry, Madame Dorel, I didn’t catch that.”
“I said Throne protect Yimora. If this is what this is doing to me in here, then… eagle’s beak, he’s perched out there in the Navigator’s roost. Throne protect him.”
Rikah helped her stagger down the ramp after the rest of them. Two more ship’s troops ran past, one toting a flamer and one pulling an outsized fuel-cylinder on a trolley.
“Can’t… afford,” she said. “It’s up ahead. Strong one. Saw it clear as day. It flared up in sympathy when we hit… that last… whatever it was.”
“If it’s that strong, Domasa…” Rikah began, but Cherrick turned and interrupted him…
“If it’s that strong we need to weaken it and damned soon,” he snarled, “because if it’s that strong then by the time it uses up all its own punch it’s going to have gutted the ship from prow to tubes and any of us left alive will soon wish we weren’t when it breaks down the hull and we get our souls torn out of our bodies. You want to wind up in some nightmare’s gullet before you get a chance to come before the Golden Throne, Rikah, then find your own way into it. Domasa?” She nodded, wearily.
“He’s right, Rikah. We’re going to finish it off. It can’t be more than a few compartments away, coming towards us. Let’s find it and get this over with.”
It didn’t seem like much longer before they were close enough to hear the screaming.
A man ran back past them, one of the ratings they had seen earlier. The buzzblade he had carried was splayed out into streamers of metal, some of them threaded into and out of his flesh in a way that stitched his arm to his body. He was howling, scorched, almost naked, insane, and Cherrick felled him with a point-blank hellshot. Varro groaned, but nobody argued: broken minds were a threat in a warp storm.
The ramp brought them to an assembly area, rows of benches across the hall and order-sheets pasted to the walls. Now the benches were overturned and broken and a crowd of crewmen were coming the other way, screaming and shoving, trying to have someone, anyone, their enemy or their best friend or the man from the shift-crew whose name they barely knew, anyone to get between themselves and death.
Death came behind them, framed in the archway where the assembly area split like the arms of a Y into two low corridors. It capered and flopped on the red-slicked deck, pausing with each little leap or stamping step as though the sensations of its lacerated feet slapping against the metal were odd and delicious. It had been unfamiliar with the limitations of the meat it had somehow become snagged in at first, and by the time it had learned that the pitiful little extremities the meat owned were supposed to move only in certain ways most of its joints had been broken or dislocated by the inhuman will moving its muscles. There was a point when if had wanted to pass through a hole it had managed to make in a bulkhead that the meat had to run around, but the hole had been barely wide enough for one extremity to fit through, so it had crumpled the hard little bone frame the meat was strung up on and fed itself through the hole like a snake. The frame had not reassembled on the other side, and trying to hold it in place through will was tiring. Now its skeleton was a mass of bone fragments and splinters all clicking and grating as it moved. Its feet either splatted on the metal with the sound of raw meat or clicked like a dog’s foot from the bone jutting through the sole.
The midshipman’s uniform it had worn when it had still had the human mind it had been born with was soaked red and dripping, but not all of the blood was its own. With a crackle of tearing flesh it shot out an arm, the skin popping as the limb distended, and a hand that looked like a cudgel spiked with bone thudded into the back of one of the rearmost crew. Only Cherrick, standing his ground at the head of the formation and clubbing crew aside as they ran at him, actually saw the red shape drag its catch back. Suddenly more bone splinters sprouted through its skin: first just their points like droplets of hard white sweat and then their whole length like bloodied cactus-spines, and it took the screaming crewman into its embrace. He screamed for a moment longer, then the red thing let him drop and gave out a gargling wail that could have been triumph, disappointment or something else beyond human thought.
The sound was enough to redouble the panic, and in another moment most of the hunt-and-destroy squad had disappeared up the ramp, all thoughts of drill and duty forgotten. Perhaps half a dozen were left, knocked sprawling or tangled in the benches or cowering by the walls. One shrieked and writhed in Cherrick’s arms and two more were grappling with the troopers. Varro and Rikah both backed away, trying to protect Domasa from the brawling before the troopers realised it wasn’t worth the trouble for people obviously so determined to run. They let them go and two sprinted away, one cannoning into Varro and then on up the ramp. The other curled against one wall, weeping.
The metallic scratch-click of shells being rammed into a shotgun snapped Varro’s attention back onto what was in front of them. In amongst the wrecked furniture, three crew were making a stand. The two they had seen with the flamer-cart crouched behind an upturned bench and worked frantically on a fuel connection— they had lost their trolley, but a little metal egg that must have been an emergency reservoir hung from a hose on the side of the casing. The sound he had heard came from the woman next to them, frantically reloading a snubby, wire-stocked shotgun as the red thing loped out of the arch.
Varro walked shakily forward, feeling as though his body was going to tear itself apart in the way the red thing’s seemed to be: the instincts branded into every cell of his body wanted to propel him back up the ramp even as his horrified, disbelieving mind told him he had to go forward. His gun trembled as he raised it.
The red thing took a half-step and re
ached for the men with the flamer, but this time its arm seemed to have trouble stretching and a shower of blood and bone splinters pattered down onto the deck. The woman with the shotgun panicked and set off one blast, stunningly loud in the low metal space. Shot rattled and stung off the metal roof and blew out two of the lamp housings; two more began to flicker and spit erratically, and the sudden sporadic light gave everyone’s movements a staccato quality that only added to the dreamlike horror.
The red thing staggered another step. Even with his ears ringing from the shotgun blast Varro could hear the sickly tearing sound its neck made as its head tilted up to look at the flickering light. One of its eyes was gone, a wet flap of skin and hair from its exploded scalp hanging over and partly sucked into the empty socket. The other eye, turned glistening black like a basalt pebble, bulged as though some unimaginable pressure from inside was about to burst it and it glittered madly in the light from the broken lamps.
The crewwoman took a breath, steadied herself and fired again as the snaking, wavering arm veered towards her. This time her aim was true, and the arm turned into a blood-spray that painted the ceiling and wrecked the half-broken lamps. Suddenly the room was almost light-less. The thought that the red thing might be advancing on them in the dark threw Varro into a panic. His hand clenched the trigger, more fear-reflex than aim, and the room was lit by a quick flurry of dim red stabs of light as Rikah joined in. At a shouted order from Cherrick two of the ship’s troops opened up too, and then the rest of them, with Cherrick at their head, darted ahead into the assembly area proper, fanning out in a line, planting their feet and adding their own fire.
“Split!” Cherrick was shouting. “Split up! Make sure if it gets near you it only gets near one of you!” And indeed, the other troopers were spreading out. Varro, his nerves and instincts screaming again, forced himself to move into the room and around the opposite wall, aim and fire again.
[Shira Calpurnia 02] - Legacy Page 18