by Dan Abnett
‘If you sat down, perhaps?’ Thonius suggested.
‘No thanks,’ replied Belknap, and continued pacing the bridge.
‘I’m not thinking of you, so much,’ said Thonius. ‘You pacing up and down is starting to piss me off.’
Belknap glared at him.
‘We should have heard something by now,’ said Plyton. ‘What’s taking her so long?’
‘Just... wait,’ said Ballack. ‘She’ll be fine. She–’
Unwerth, hunched over the master console, made a small sound.
‘What?’ asked Belknap, switching around to face him. ‘What?’
Unwerth pointed dismally at the display with a disfigured hand.
‘The Allure just lit its drive,’ said Plyton, staring.
‘No,’ said Belknap. ‘Come on, Kara, come on. By the grace of the Throne and the blessing of the God-Emperor...’
‘It’s left grav anchorage,’ Plyton whispered. She rose to her feet, staring at the plot display. ‘Oh no.’
‘She’s running,’ said Ballack, ‘accelerating onto an out-system vector.’
‘Kara!’ Belknap howled, helplessly. The Allure was departing. There was nothing they could do.
The vox-bank behind Thonius chimed.
PART FOUR
End of Story
One
Patience Kys remained in the brig aboard the Arethusa for thirteen days. In part, her stay was enforced, in part voluntary.
On the first day of her incarceration, less than an hour after the terrifying voice had spoken to her from the keyhole, she felt the deck shiver. Various rumbles and vibrations followed, and she knew they were casting off. The main drives cycled up until the air filled with a long, throbbing background hum. An hour after that, she felt the brief, disconcerting shudder of translation.
Several hours later, the tank door swung open and Thonius came in with a mess tray of food and a flask of water. He set them down on the end of the tank’s small cot and looked at her.
‘Do you need anything else?’ he asked stiffly. ‘A book, perhaps?’
‘I need to be let out of here,’ she said.
He sighed. ‘Kys, I can’t do that. You know I can’t.’
‘Listen to me, Carl, please,’ Kys said quickly, rising to her feet. ‘Zael represents an absolute threat to us. Every second we waste brings us closer to disaster. You know what Gideon thought about the boy.’
‘I know he didn’t kill him immediately,’ said Carl. ‘I know he left the boy alive and gave him the benefit of the doubt.’
‘That doubt is gone.’
‘Ravenor left Frauka–’
‘Frauka is compromised. Zael is awake. The daemon is here, waking, among us.’
Thonius smiled sadly. ‘Patience, old thing, I feel for you, I really do. I know you think you’re right, but I’ll tell you what’s really happening. Gideon is dead. You are undermined by grief and a mistaken feeling of responsibility. You are not thinking clearly. You’re reacting too extremely. It’s understandable. You think you let Ravenor down in life, and you’re trying not to do the same now he’s dead.’
‘Do I pay extra for the cod psychoanalysis?’ she asked.
He pouted. ‘This has been a bad, bad time for all of us. Don’t make it worse by lashing out at phantoms.’
‘You won’t let me out?’
‘Can I trust you not to try and kill Zael again?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Well, at least you didn’t try to lie to me,’ he said. ‘You have to stay in here for now, for your own safety as much as Zael’s. Maybe in a day or two–’
‘I’ll have calmed down? Seen sense?’
‘You need time to reflect.’
Kys stared at him. ‘Just a few hours ago, it spoke to me. It spoke to me through the door.’
‘What did?’
She swallowed. ‘Slyte.’
Thonius shook his head.
‘I experienced a major psychic event,’ she insisted.
‘One that nobody else felt? One that didn’t set off any of the ship’s detectors?’
‘Please, Carl! Please! I’m begging you! Examine Zael yourself, examine Frauka too. He’s lying. He’s protecting the boy. Please tell me you’ll check it yourself. We are all in danger and–’
‘Eat some food. Get some rest,’ he said, moving back towards the door.
She sat down heavily on the cot. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
‘Gudrun.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s where we believe Molotch is.’
‘Why?’ she repeated.
‘Information received. Look, I’ve got things to do.’
‘Let me talk to Kara, then.’
A strange expression crossed his face. ‘I’ll check back later,’ he said.
She slept for a while. As Kara had warned her, the quality of her sleep was not good. Flocks of whispers circled her dreams, like the eerie twittering of the Wych House.
Thonius returned six hours later with another tray, and removed the first. She’d picked at the meal.
‘Will you let me out?’ she asked.
‘Will you try to kill Zael?’
She shrugged.
‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘Where’s Kara?’ she asked.
With great reluctance, he told her how Kara had boarded the Allure, obtained the information they needed, and never returned. The news knifed shock into her. Coming so soon after the hammer blow of Ravenor’s death, it seemed extravagantly cruel and unnecessary. She wept inconsolably, tormented by a feeling of helplessness. Thonius made some half-hearted soothing noises and then left her alone.
Kys continued to weep for hours. She was so wracked with sobs it seemed that she was crying out her own grief as well as the grief Ravenor would have expressed if he had lived to witness Kara’s fate.
The pattern was repeated for the next ten days. Carl Thonius visited her twice each day, bringing her food and water, and the occasional book or data-slate, none of which she read. She would ask to be released, and he would ask her if she still intended to hurt Zael. She would beg him to take her seriously, and he would tell her to rest and reflect.
It was always Thonius. He never made the mistake of sending Belknap or Frauka, either of whom she would have had no hesitation in trying to overpower. Carl Thonius was canny. He clearly understood this, and understood that she would not raise a hand against him. The things he knew.
Neither Plyton nor Unwerth were sent to look in on her with food. Kys suspected Thonius didn’t trust either of them to be unsympathetic.
The rest of the time was largely silent, apart from the throb of the gunning drive. Several times, she thought about trying the door again, certain she had recouped enough strength to manipulate the lock. The memory of the whispering voice dissuaded her every time.
The voice, mercifully, never returned, although the whispers haunted her edgy dreams, and on more than one occasion, wide awake, she heard distant laughter coming from nowhere.
On the twelfth day, the ship shuddered, and the tone of the drive altered, and she knew they had returned to normal space. Carl came in two hours later, but he seemed preoccupied and his visit was brief. Pausing only long enough to comment that she wasn’t eating enough as he picked up the last tray, he left and locked the door.
After that, no one came at all.
The drone of the drive cut out, and the Arethusa fell silent. Kys paced. She waited. The silence bore down on her, total silence, apart from the sporadic stress creaks and groans of the settling hull.
When the next visit was missed, Kys drank the rest of her water and ate what remained of the last meal. Anxiety had robbed her of her appetite for eleven days. Now the waiting made her ravenous.
When she was sure she was in the thirteenth day of imprisonment, she went to the tank door and banged her fist on it, calling out. She did this for some minutes.
No one answered.
Scared, she s
at down in the corner of the cell furthest from the door and waited. The hours ticked slowly by.
She woke with a start, still sitting in the corner. Something had woken her, some noise.
She listened. She reached out cautiously with her mind.
The first howl came out of nowhere. It lasted ten seconds, and was essentially pure psychic noise. It was like some great beast bellowing in pain, or the throat-roar of an apex predator. The first touch of it was so loud, so fierce that her mind recoiled in shock.
The echo of the howl lingered in the ship’s hull.
Eyes wide in fear, she made herself as small as possible, arms around her upthrust knees. Her body was bathed in cold sweat, fear sweat, and her mind was sore from just that brief touch. She could hear her heart pounding like a marching drum.
A second howl split the air. The deck vibrated with its intensity. Kys whimpered involuntarily, viced by an extreme terror she had never known before.
Ice rime formed around the edges of the tank door, and glistened at the key hole.
A third howl issued, longer and more anguished than either of the first two. She heard hatches bang and footsteps running past along the hallway outside. Someone was shouting, but she couldn’t hear what. Someone else shouted back.
Silence.
More shouting. Distant footsteps, running along a deck above. Then, an odd, piping sound that she finally, fearfully, realised was a muffled, persistent screaming. She dared not reach out with her mind.
Everything went quiet for an agonising thirty or forty minutes. The ice around the door melted into glinting spots of dew. Just when she thought nothing more would come, there was a fourth, dreadful psychic roar, and then a fifth, the longest of all. It was followed by a long, painful bout of sobbing. A man was wailing somewhere, wailing with his mind. She grimaced and tried to shut it out. The sobs clawed at the edges of her thoughts until they became frayed.
The sobbing faded. More shouting began, real voices shouting. Kys jumped at the sudden boom of a gun, a shotgun or an autorifle. It fired four times in quick succession. Someone shouted, distantly, and then a barrage of angry voices started up, yelling over one another. The shotgun fired again. A lasgun wailed.
Then silence drifted back into place.
She could bear it no longer. Kys rose and slowly approached the door, swallowing her fear back. It was like a bolus of food stuck in her throat, choking her.
She was three metres from the tank door when the most terrifying event of her life took place.
The centre of the steel door, at a little above waist height, began to bulge, as if the metal was alive. The bulge pushed in towards her, and she backed away.
An impression formed: bared teeth. The frontal dentition, upper and lower, of an adult male’s skull, complete with chin bone below and traces of nasal bone above. There was no sign of eye sockets or forehead. It was as if the door had become a taut, flexible skin of rubber, and someone on the other side was pushing the lower part of an incomplete skull into it.
Something hit Kys from behind. It was the rear wall of the tank. She had backed away as far as it was physically possible to go. The imprint of the skull smile bulged in further, until it was a hand’s breadth proud of the door’s surface. It became even more clearly defined. The metal strained around it.
‘The Emperor protects,’ Kys stammered. ‘The Emperor protects.’
The skull smile slowly opened its jaws.
Then it pulled away sharply and vanished. The door became flat again. Kys kept staring at the door.
After a second or two, the smile reappeared, bulging in at a different, higher part of the door. It opened and closed its jaws twice.
It withdrew as rapidly as before, and then reappeared lower down. This time, it writhed back and forth as it opened and closed, turning to the left, to the right, biting at the air. Kys could hear sobbing, loud and close.
The smile withdrew again. Ice sweat tricked down the door’s surface, twinkling and glittering like frost. It formed a crust, like on the inside of a refrigeration unit, and then the caked bulk of it collapsed under its own weight and shattered across the cell floor in a shower of snowy debris.
Her back to the rear wall of the tank, Kys slid down and began to shake.
The Arethusa stayed quiet for a long time after that. There was no more sobbing or shouting or gun-shots, no more howling. The door did not smile at her again.
Kys got up, walked towards the door, and listened.
Nothing.
She breathed in, exhaled, and quickly reached her mind into the lock. Fear and fury in equal measure fuelled her with a clinical precision. She seized the lock, scorching the tips of her mind’s tendrils on the anti-psi wards, and rattled the tumblers into place.
The lock slumped open with a heavy clack and she mind-wrenched the bolt back.
Kys touched the edge of the door with the tip of one shoe and it swung open heavily.
Her thirteen-day stay in the Arethusa’s brig had come to an end.
She walked along the grim, poorly lit hallway of the brig block. Nothing howled, nothing sobbed, nothing smiled. The air was close and warm, as if the ship’s air pumps had shut down.
She looked for a weapon, but the best she could find was a set of keys hanging on a peg. She took the old, heavy keys off their ring and put them in a pocket. In an emergency, she could kine them.
She stole through the brig’s half open outer hatch onto the grille mesh of the lower third access. There was no sign of anything in either direction. The access was lit by wall globes, one or two of which were flickering on and off like candle flames guttering in a draught.
Her spike heels caught in the deck mesh, so she slipped her shoes off and carried them.
Padding forwards in stocking feet, she reached a junction. Ahead, the short, bulk-headed passage to the aft air gate. Left, a flicker-lit companionway turned back to the enginarium.
To the right, a corridor led forwards.
She turned right. Ten metres along, she found a spilled box of shotgun cartridges, a discarded boot and a damp towel.
The air was still very stale. More of the glow-globes and lumin panels were flickering on and off.
Kys bent down and pressed her hand against the cast iron wall, low down. There was no vibration at all. No throb of power plant, or of idling drive. Although the air was fuggy, it was getting colder.
The Arethusa was like a cooling corpse.
At the next junction, she reached a wall-mounted intercom, a recessed speaker cone with a brass switch. She put her shoes down and reached out for the switch.
It took her a long time to pluck up the courage to push it.
Click. A long, empty sigh of dead leaves and static breathed out of the speaker.
She took her finger off the switch and the sound went dead. She pressed the switch again, and said, into the rustling, ‘Hello?’
The static shushed her.
‘Hello? Anyone?’
Somewhere far away, behind the hiss of dry leaves, a man started sobbing.
Kys took her finger off the switch and killed the sound.
At the next junction, there was a fire control point riveted to the hull. She helped herself to the heavy, saw-toothed fire axe hanging over the sand box. Axe in one hand, shoes in the other, she continued on her way.
The Arethusa’s small excursion bay was empty. The docking clamps were vacant. Neither of the ship’s two battered landers were present. Kys stood on the overlook platform for a while, staring down into the open vault. The heavy duty docking clamps, thick with black grease and lubricant jelly, stared back at her. Some of the fuelling hoses on the right-hand side of the bay had been disconnected in a hurry. Pools of spilled fuel covered the deck plates.
‘Where did everyone go?’ she asked out loud. She didn’t dare ask her real question.
Why did everyone go?
Halfway along the companionway leading to the forward junction, she found a place where the wall pl
ates had been dented and scorched by gunfire. The marks were fresh, carbonised. A metre or two further along, there was a smeared streak of blood on the wall, and a track of drops leading away down the tunnel.
Wall lights blinked on and off, strobing manically.
She bent down. The blood was cold.
She entered the infirmary. She put her shoes on before she did, because the floors in the upper decks were solid plate.
She slithered in slowly, her axe raised.
The outer surgery was empty. Water drizzled out of a half open tap into a scrub bowl. She turned the faucet off. The doors to the pharm cupboards were open, and the contents ransacked. Pill boxes littered the floor. She was crunching over scattered capsules, grinding them to powder.
She could hear a soft, panting, purring sound.
Kys nudged the adjoining door open with the head of her axe. The panting grew louder. She reached out, but her mind touched nothing at all.
She entered the ward room. The air stank of Frauka’s lho-sticks, a cold, distant, tarnished after-smell.
There was nobody in the ward room. Zael’s cot was empty. The plug feeds and drip tubes that had been keeping him alive were draped over the crumpled bed, leaking fluids. The life support unit he had been attached to was grinding and rattling, its lung bellow rising and falling with a dry pant. Cardiac systems and brainwave monitors purred aimlessly.
Kys walked over to the cot. She scraped the sheets back with the blade of her fire axe, although she knew the cot was empty. She reached over and turned off the relentless life support unit.
The bellows ceased their panting and became still. The monitors buzzed. Viscous fluid squirted out of the lank tubes left on the bed. A flat line alarm began to ping.
She wrenched the unit away from the wall to make it shut up. The bellows flapped and sighed.
Silence returned.
She walked around the cot and sat down in Frauka’s chair. His dish of lho-butts sat on the bedside cabinet. The last one had burned itself out in a long, perfect column of white ash. His data-slate was on the floor in front of the chair. It was still switched on, the battery low warning flashing.
She reached down and picked it up.