The Lords of Silence

by Chris Wraight

  It is Hovik who makes the first breakthrough. She is leaning over a sensor column, turning a dial slowly, her face underlit by rapidly ­strobing lights.

  ‘My lord,’ she says.

  Vorx walks over to her. She is using ancient equipment. Everything on the bridge is ancient. Without its incorporated biological growths and deep-sunk organic fusions, it would have given up long ago. The Death Guard no longer tend machinery – they have forgotten how. But they understand cells and respiration and circulation, and so much of what they use employs these methods.

  ‘I have a partial match,’ she reports, gesturing towards the cracked lens cover.

  Vorx takes a look. He sees overlaid stellar schematics – lines of soft phosphor traced over a lattice of hand-drawn sigils. He sees correspondences, albeit only partially.

  ‘We have come a long way,’ he murmurs.

  ‘I cannot read these runes,’ Hovik says, isolating calligraphic script on the facsimile of parchment.

  Vorx struggles to do so. Once, he would have been able to read Gothic as easily as any other language, but two things have changed since his early career – he has grown older and his mind is less rapid, and Gothic itself has evolved. It is now a language of internal contradictions and overl­apping meanings, a palimpsest that never quite lets the old layers get wiped clean. It is uglier now, filled with more ornament than it ever used to have.

  But some words are technical, and alter little.

  ‘Segmentum Obscurus,’ he reads. ‘Sector, subsector… I cannot make that out. Gods of regeneration, we are a long way out.’

  Hovik looks at him, concerned. ‘Imperial space, sure enough. But I hear nothing. No astropathic bursts in the psy-scoop. No warp-wakes. It is all… empty.’

  Vorx looks harder. Hovik is right. The sensor readings are too few. It is as if some hand has scraped the universe clean, pulling the glimmers of life – always tenuous – from its dark surface.

  ‘I sense shock,’ says Vorx. ‘Trauma-response.’ He turns to her. ‘The Despoiler has wounded reality, Hovik.’ He laughs – a coarse, throttled snort through his congested airways. ‘Perhaps Dragan is right. Perhaps Abaddon was the real thing.’

  The allusion passes over her head. Hovik, like all the Unchanged, cares or understands little of the politics of the Eye. She knows nothing of the furious warfare carried out over centuries within its tormented heart, or of the theological differences between its protagonists. She does not comprehend that a single Plague Marine might have to balance many competing loyalties – towards his warband, his Legion, his primarch, the Despoiler’s dominions, his own oaths made millennia ago, his desires. She has enough cares of her own – the ship, the many demands of the crew, survival.

  ‘I see nothing to aim for,’ she says, used to Vorx’s cryptic musings and focused on the task at hand.

  He cycles the range a little further out, feeling like a fisherman throwing a net over a dry wasteland.

  Then Drez-Uil, half-buried amid old and creaking augur platforms, gets something. ‘Long-range void sounding,’ he announces, working furiously. ‘Distress, I think – hard to pick out.’

  Vorx is moving. ‘Lock it down,’ he orders. ‘How far?’

  ‘On the edge of our scopes,’ says Drez-Uil. ‘And we are heading away from it.’

  ‘Full turn,’ says Vorx, and the command is relayed by Hovik to the navigation pits. Slave crew jump to action, hauling levers, stamping trajectory scrolls and sending them trundling down vacuum tubes. Stars wheel across the realviewers as Solace awkwardly comes about. ‘Reel it in.’

  Philemon enters, cradling a Little Lord and some rolls of parchment. He draws alongside Vorx and watches the picter lenses scroll.

  ‘Found something?’ he asks.

  ‘I do not know yet,’ says Vorx, greeting him with a nod. ‘A lure to chase, at least.’

  ‘Your daemon is restored.’

  Philemon hands the Little Lord to Vorx, who glances at it, grunts, and turns back to the augur. The creature blows an outraged raspberry and hops up into the rafters, where it sits, sulking.

  ‘I looked into the numerology,’ says Philemon.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘We hold fate in our hands,’ says the Tallyman. ‘For the first time since the Hive came among us. There are real choices here, siegemaster. You understand me?’

  Vorx half listens. He is watching the phosphor-blip as it travels over the lens.

  ‘It has never been thus in living memory,’ Philemon goes on. ‘We have been permitted to raid, here and there. To bleed the Corpse a little, a slice or two of flesh. Now the door is opened. This brings danger. You will see it soon. We will all need to learn.’

  Vorx is looking at the signal of the ship. Some details are emerging. It is Imperial, and it is running. It looks small.

  ‘Where is the Lord Primarch?’ he asks.

  ‘I do not know. We have been displaced, in both time and location.’

  ‘We have our orders.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  Vorx turns to face the Tallyman. ‘Some things endure. I will find him again, fight at his side, just as I promised we would.’

  Philemon’s face is exposed. His concern is obvious. His sore-thick lip twitches. ‘You have the care of this warband, lord,’ he says. ‘Do not neglect it.’

  ‘Aquatic hunters,’ says Vorx.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘We need data.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Vorx sighs. ‘I will give this to Dragan. I will lend him Garstag and the Kardainn. They can take what they want from it, as long as I have the information.’

  ‘Go yourself.’

  In another age, Vorx might have raised an eyebrow. He no longer has eyebrows. He barely has a forehead.

  ‘You need to kill,’ Philemon says. ‘You need to give them trophies.’

  ‘I am not some petty warlord.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’ Philemon smiles sadly. ‘We all are. For now. Play the part a little longer and we may yet survive to see a restoration of what was promised.’

  Vorx thinks on this. As he does so, the bridge becomes more animated around him. Other stations pick up the scent, and servitors flex their bound fingers and gape into oculus-enhancers. Solace itself trembles, as if it smells something in the void and yearns to wrap its mandibles around fresh meat.

  ‘I do not need to prove myself,’ Vorx says.

  ‘All the time,’ Philemon replies. ‘None of us escapes.’

  Vorx emits a sour chuckle. He likes Philemon, and he likes the Tally­man’s fatalism. All the breed share this trait. They, by vocation, peer into the darkest corners of the universe’s foundations, the matterless structure on which all else is built, and it makes them dour.

  ‘Very well,’ Vorx says. ‘Bring me Exact. I shall scrape the rust off it with the unbeliever’s flesh.’

  His Imperial Majesty’s Service Ship ER-587-D runs hard.

  The engines are dangerously hot. This is not a warp-capable vessel, and it does not have the heavy shielding units over its enginarium core that a bigger ship would carry. It does not have Navigators, and it does not have much in the way of weaponry. It has a complement of fifty-two armed guardians taken from Najan’s standing local defence forces, all of whom are now on high alert. It has six pulse guns set fore and an old lascannon lodged under the main cockpit overhang, which Captain Kovasha has never had a great deal of faith in and has only had cause to use twice in over ten years.

  A service ship is not designed to fight. It is not even designed to be on its own. For the last few decades, ER-587-D has never been out of the shadow of protective escorts. Its management protocols are all built around short journeys between colony worlds, its holds stuffed with synth-grains and bulk carb-loads. Kovasha can’t remember when he didn’t have a destroyer or a monitor within a
few hours’ hail distance. His training has always emphasised that – if in peril, run to the shadow of your protectors.

  But there are no protectors left. He is becoming light-headed as he sits on his crude command throne. His palms are wet. He feels as if the universe has folded in on itself, the old certainties gone and no new ones ready to take their place.

  There is a terrible rumour, spread over the inter-ship vox-net while it still existed, that the Astronomican beacon is gone, and that Navigators have been driven mad by its loss and the entire sector fleet is adrift and burning. Now the net is down. No signals from Najan have been received for four days. This feeds other rumours – that Terra itself has been consumed by fire, that monsters are now bursting from the hearts of men, that the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes have withdrawn their protection from the Imperium and that planets are being devoured one by one.

  Kovasha would not normally believe rumours like that. He is that ­rarest thing in the Imperium – a calm and rational man – and yet now his all-consuming fear is making him jumpy.

  ‘How far?’ he asks his sensorium mistress.

  Ailah turns to face him from down in the augur trench, looking as clammy as he feels. ‘Nothing yet. But… oh, Throne. I have something on the long-range scanners now.’

  Kovasha feels his stomach lurch. ‘Show me.’

  His throne-mounted array of lenses switches to near-field, rotated for main-yaw correction. He struggles to focus as the view pans and then drunkenly zooms, but finally something comes into focus, several hundred kilometres off but closing very fast.

  He swallows. ‘What is that?’ he croaks.

  No answers come. No one on the bridge has seen anything like it, except perhaps in their nightmares.

  ‘It is on an intercept course,’ Ailah says weakly. ‘We cannot go any faster.’

  Kovasha does not know where the destroyers are. There was something a week ago, only half picked up, about emergency protocols being enacted and all Naval assets going to crimson station, but of course that meant nothing to him, and in any case they were due to dock with the mass conveyer Davanger XIII by the scheduled switch time and so could not pay much attention to garbled intercepts.

  Only the conveyer wasn’t there. And the comm fell into silence. And it stayed silent. They have been running for Najan ever since, perfectly aware that whatever has happened, it is wholly unprecedented and very serious.

  He finds that his hand is shaking, and clenches it against the armrest of his throne.

  ‘Evasive manoeuvres,’ he says.

  Ailah stares at him. The navigation captain, Splaed, stares at him. They are in a volume of empty space. They have standard sub-plasma drives. They do not know what he means by ‘evasive manoeuvres’.

  But Kovasha doesn’t say any more. He feels something hot and wet in his lap, and looks down. His nose is bleeding. The drops form a dark web on his fatigues. He wipes the blood away, but it won’t stop coming.

  Then he can hear what sounds like buzzing over the ship’s voxcasters, and raps the transmitter attached to the throne. Ailah looks suddenly unwell. She bends over in her seat, clutching her stomach.

  Kovasha struggles to concentrate. ‘How close?’ he asks.

  Ailah does not answer. Splaed reaches over to her station and stares at the data. ‘Holy saints, it’s right on us,’ he says. Then he suddenly belches and vomits over Ailah’s tactical column, gripping it until his knuckles go white.

  Automatic proximity klaxons start up, whirling and wailing. The bridge lumens flicker and die, plunging them all into perfect dark.

  ‘Emergency power!’ shrieks Kovasha, getting to his feet and reaching for his sidearm. Blood is running freely over his chin now, and he feels faint.

  Dull red lumens glow into life, doing the bare minimum to banish the shadows. He sees silhouettes of his crew stumbling around, some bleeding like he is, others gripping themselves in agony that has come from nowhere. The buzzing is getting worse – it makes it hard to think.

  He staggers across the main dais. He can hear thumps from somewhere up above, and then a big crash. The ship reels, spinning around as if it has been punched by a giant hand. He hears metal screaming against metal, then a series of explosions.

  He curses as he realises that his powerpack is empty. He has been meaning to check it properly for the long days of the race home, but something more important has always come up. He lurches back to the throne, to the compartments built into the arms with all the many essential things he needs to store and use. As he drops to his knees, he hears the crashes getting closer – huge impacts, one after the other, like horrific drumbeats. The klaxons wail, and the buzzing starts to hurt his ears.

  He gets to the compartment, reaches for the security catch, fumbles it. He has blood on his gloves, and his chest is now sticky with it.

  The buzzing becomes maddening, and he swats at imaginary flies. Ailah is still vomiting – the liquid has turned bloody and black. Men are screaming, women are screaming, and the deck is vibrating underfoot to a steady and increasing slam rhythm. Kovasha can hardly see what he’s doing, but he manages to pull the hatch open and get a fresh powerpack out. Trembling, he slots the replacement into the sidearm and depresses the inlet catch.

  Then he’s turning, swinging around to face the bridge, holding the lasgun two-handed and trying to find something to aim at.

  The darkness is as thick as bilge, a jumble of blurred outlines against a dull red haze. The buzzing drowns out even the screams now, though he still can’t see any damn flies. His skin crawls. His bleeding gets worse. Splaed is hurling up something stringy.

  Then the doors blow apart. Bodies of guardians fly through the ragged gap, their limbs flopping. Kovasha aims his lasgun and fires – three lines of searing heat that light up tortured shapes he cannot identify. For a moment he thinks he has shot into a mess of writhing snakes spilling through the jagged breach to slap and slither across the deck.

  But then giants stride into the open, and he sees that the snakes are coils of flesh erupting from thick plates of armour. The giants are monsters of shadow. Their stink is phenomenal, clogging the air. It makes him instantly gag, and he feels saliva pool in his cheeks even as he scrabbles away.

  They do not hurry. Pale-green points of light shine from grotesque helms. Miasma clouds them, swirling about their every movement. Kovasha fires again, then again, his finger glued to the trigger in his panic. He cannot see how many there are – five? Six?

  They are not saying anything. He can hear only breathing, like a caged animal’s, throaty and phlegmy. His crew are being killed, steadily and methodically, and he cannot do anything. He swivels round, his back against the command throne, and fires some more. Every las-beam lights up more horror – claws ripping through skin, bones breaking under cloven treads.

  Then one of the monsters comes for him, stalking with deliberation, absorbing the las-fire as if it were a patter of raindrops. Kovasha sees a fractured helm and twin lenses that shine with a sick, pale light. He sees a huge scythe sweep through the clouds of flies and dust, ludicrously big with a blunt blade that drips with an oily residue. The monster isn’t even really using it – it’s holding the weapon one-handed and killing with its other fist, barely reaching out.

  Kovasha, in his mindless terror, notices odd details. He notices that the monster has numbers etched on its armour, hundreds of them, alongside other little signs and symbols he does not recognise. He notices that there is a larger image on the hemisphere of its shoulderguard – a finger held up against a closed mouth. He notices, even in the dark, that the colour of the plate is indeterminate – a mottled pattern of greys, blacks, greens and ivories, like lichen on old rock, overlapping and overlaid in a parody of sedimentation.

  Then he is looking right into the monster’s eyes. He can smell its sulphurous aura, hear its claggy breaths within the cavern of its chest.
He wants to scream out, but his throat has seized up. He cannot fire his weapon. He cannot move.

  The monster leans over him. ‘You are fortunate,’ it says, in slurring Gothic that sounds like something from the dawn of time. The accent is heavy, alien, palpably ancient, distorted by a vox-mask and the tubes and whatever else lurks under that nightmarish faceplate.

  Kovasha can barely process that. Fortunate? Is that a sick joke?

  The monster looms closer, and the stench nearly makes Kovasha lose consciousness.

  ‘You will teach us,’ the monster says. ‘That is what preserves you. Consider it a trade.’

  Kovasha understands none of that. This has become unreal, like a drug-induced dream, something that cannot possibly be happening.

  ‘Where–’ he blurts, spitting up more blood.

  The monster waits, patiently. ‘You are trying to speak. Try again.’

  ‘Where–’ says Kovasha.

  The monster gives him time.

  ‘Where. Are. You. From?’

  That seems to give it pause. It rests on the scythe, and a gurgling chuckle slips from its helm.

  ‘Where are we from?’

  It draws in a long, wheezing breath. Kovasha thinks it is amused, though he has no idea why.

  ‘Not the first time I’ve been asked,’ it says. ‘And it is a story. But, then again, we have plenty of time. So listen.’

  II: The Manse

  Chapter Five

  A long time ago, it seems now.

  From the void, the world of Eliathada looks beautiful. No one calls it that anymore. Almost no one in the galaxy even remembers the name, save for that warpstorm-tossed remnant of a race who used to own it, and they never come here. The word means ‘sublime soul garden’ in a tongue that was once spoken the length and breadth of known space.