by Ben Counter
'Why?' A hot tear ran down Ligeia's face. 'What else is there? The galaxy will die. The Change will swallow everything. No matter how hard we fight, we are all lost in the end. I have seen it happen. There can be no victory against fate, inquisitor. Valinov's freedom is a part of that fate, just like my arrest, just like the fact that you will all die, and all your triumphs will crumble to dust.'
'Enough.' said Santoro. He stepped forward and hit Ligeia with a backhanded strike across the face that sent her reeling to the floor.
As unconsciousness took Ligeia, she could still see Ghargatuloth smothering the stars and the Lord of Change marching in step behind him, infecting the very fabric of the universe with the stain of Chaos.
ALARIC HAD LOST a colleague he trusted. He had also lost a friend. When Ligeia was brought onto the Rubicon and shut into the ship's psyker-warded brig, Alaric had seen a broken woman, not much more than a shadow of the insightful noblewoman he had come to trust.
Inquisitor Klaes, Alaric could tell from looking at his face, felt the same. To think that Ghargatuloth could rob such a woman of her reason, without her even having to come close to him, was terrifying. No one was safe. For the first time, Alaric seriously wondered if Ghargatuloth could do the same thing to a Grey Knight if one of them got near enough. Not one single Grey Knight had ever fallen to Chaos - would Alaric, or one of the men under his command, be the first? The thought all but made him sick.
Ligeia had not sent her death cultists to retrieve the sword of Mandulis. She had sent them to Mimas where, acting on her orders, they had helped Valinov escape his execution. The last anyone heard of Valinov, he was fleeing on a stolen gunship out of Saturn's rings, followed by a host of Ordo Malleus ships from Iapetus which lost him in the gas giant's outer ring.
Valinov would have been well out of the solar system by the time Ligeia was arrested. There was a possibility that one of the death cultists was still alive and accompanying him. It was treachery on a grand scale - Ligeia, who knew more than most about the many atrocities Valinov had committed against the Imperial citizenry, had conspired with him to help him escape his punishment.
Quite how Valinov had got his claws into her, Alaric couldn't be certain. But he was certain of one thing - Ghargatuloth had helped him do it. Probably it had started with the Codicium Aeternum itself, and with Ligeia's first interrogation of Valinov on Mimas. Alaric himself had read the pages of the Codicium Aeternum - had Ghargatuloth tried to lever open his mind, too, and plant his orders inside?
Ghargatuloth had acted through the statue from Victrix Sonora and the texts recovered from Sophano Secundus, maybe even the archives on Trepytos in which Ligeia had immersed herself, planting hidden information in her head that had eaten away at her sanity without her knowing it until it was too late. She had been used. The Grey Knights had also been used to play their part in an unravelling plot Ghargatuloth had woven into the Trail of St Evisser since before the first time he was banished.
And now, with Ligeia gone, Alaric had to face it alone.
Ghargatuloth was not just the monster Mandulis had killed. He was knowledge planted in the minds of his followers, the same knowledge that could infect the minds of his pawns and force them to do insane things. Alaric had fought daemons and cultists in the past many times on the road to becoming a justicar, but they had always ultimately been enemies he could see and touch and kill. Ghargatuloth, on the other hand, was a power that did not have to fight the Ordo Malleus to win.
AFTER THE Rubicon had left Trepytos for Mimas, Alaric set about picking up the pieces of Ligeia's investigation. He had to have her chambers stripped and the contents burned; there was no way of knowing how many of the notes she left behind were tainted. But it was the only chance Alaric had. And if there was anyone in the Imperium who could follow up her investigation without falling prey to the call of Ghargatuloth, it was a Grey Knight.
Inquisitor Klaes had put all the resources of the Trepytos fortress at Alaric's command. Klaes's best ship, the one Ligeia's death cultists had used, was still impounded at the Naval fortress on Iapetus, but Klaes called in some favours. Within days Alaric had two armed merchantmen, the fastest ships on the Trail with veteran ex-Naval crews.
Alaric had sent Genhain on the Rubicon to escort Ligeia to Mimas. Genhain was to travel to Titan afterwards and, on Alaric's authority as acting Brother-Captain and commander of the strike force, recover the sword of Mandulis. If this really was the 'lightning bolt' Valinov had spoken of, then perhaps it was the only chance the Grey Knights had in the coming reckoning with Ghargatuloth.
Squad Santoro and Squad Tancred were now quartered in the fortress, taking up the training floor in makeshift cells and practicing their combat drills in the duelling arena. The fortress had once been impressive but Alaric was acutely aware, as he prepared to take up the investigation that had cost Ligeia her mind, that the Trail of St Evisser had few resources he could commandeer compared to the millennia-old cult network of Ghargatuloth. The upsurge in cult activity had seen the Naval ships and Guardsmen stationed on the Trail increase in number, but it was still too small a force to cover the whole Trail.
Even if the Ecclesiarchy could be persuaded to put their Sisters of Battle - tough and motivated troops who demanded respect - at Alaric's disposal, there would never be enough manpower for anything other than one solid strike.
Most of the Grey Knights were at the Eye of Terror, fighting a tide of daemons pouring out of that huge warp storm into realpsace. The rest were stretched far too thinly, holding down the many daemonic blackspots across the Imperium - the Maelstrom, the Gates of Varl, Diocletian Nebula, a dozen other weeping sores in real space. There would be no reinforcements from Titan.
Alaric knew now why so many qualities were needed for a leader, qualities he was still not sure he had. He had to fight, win, never waver in his faith in the Emperor and lead his fellow Grey Knights in all these things. But more than that - he had to be able to do all this when he knew he was utterly alone.
Chapter Eleven
PECUNIAM OMNIS
THE PECUNIAM OMNIS dragged its cargo painfully across the Segmentum Solar, its engines flaring badly where the exhaust vents had become caked in deposits, its ageing nav-cogitator wasting fuel by constantly correcting its course. The run between Jurn and Epsion Octarius was a hard one, too competitive to allow for capital to be wasted on maintaining a decaying cargo ship, nowhere near lucrative enough to be able to replace it.
Captain Yambe knew that he would probably die with the Pecuniam Omnis. He was forty-seven years old. It was a good age for a cargo crewman - most died in accidents or dockyard brawls long before then. Yambe had survived two major wrecks and Emperor knew how many rough nights at harbour, but having finally made captain of his own ship he knew he would never be able to break out. He owed too much to too many people to be able to walk away, and he would never amass enough credits to upgrade his corroded ship.
Yambes's crew, at least, knew what they were doing -thirty men manning the few habitable areas surrounding the ship's bloated metal abdomen. The huge airless cargo holds carried vast quantities of Jurnian industrial product, from pre-moulded STC habitats to crates of mass-produced lasguns. The crew were hard-bitten and tough, most of them probably criminals treating the Pecuniam Omnis as a place to hide. Yambe didn't care as long as they gave the tech-rituals at least some passing respect and knew one end of a hyperspanner from the other.
The bridge of the Pecuniam was cramped and hot, stinking of sweat and engine oil. Yambe himself was running to fat, filling the command chair and slowly saturating its tattered upholstery with sweat. A half-empty bottle of Jurnian Second Best, a foul but highly effective spirit that Yambe could no longer sleep without, teetered on the arm of the chair. In front of Yambe a transparent plasteel hemisphere was blistered out of the front of the Pecuniam like the bulbous eye of an insect, looking out onto the cold, hateful space in which Yambe had spent most of his life.
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The Pecuniam had dropped out of the warp so the ship's second-rate Navigator, a skinny, twitchy guy from one of the Lower Houses, could meditate for a few days on the right path to take on the next warp jump. The Navigator was a joke, but his House's fee wasn't. The astropath, Gell, wasn't much cheaper but at least she had some idea of what she was doing.
Yambe hated space. That was why he couldn't stop looking at it. He knew that one day it would rear up and kill him, and that would be the day he had let his guard down. He had been centimetres away from hard vacuum, once, and had seen friends turned inside-out in a hull breach back when he still let himself have friends. Space had killed more men than women had, and that was saying something.
The crammed banks of comm-consoles and instrument cogitators beeped and hummed behind Yambe, occasionally belching plumes of steam from coolant leaks. He could hear the engines groaning as they pushed the Pecuniam slowly through overlapping gravity fields from an asteroid belt looping around ahead of it; his ship wouldn't last much longer.
Maybe when he got to Epsion Octarius he would just leave the Pecuniam to rot and jump planet, try to find some other way to live out a lifetime he didn't deserve. Screw the docking fees. Screw the creditors.
But he knew full well he would just load up with food and luxuries from Epsion Octarius and start hauling them back to Jurn.
'Boss.' came a vox, warped and distorted from the stern of the ship. It was Lestin, the head of the engine crew and the only man Yambe trusted to keep the Pecuniam moving. 'Got a problem.'
Yambe spat. 'What kind?'
'Impact. Looks like something took out the fourth cluster.'
'"Took it out" like you can fix it or "took it out" like it's gone for good?'
'Kerrel went to take a look. Hasn't come back.'
Yambe didn't need to lose a man. 'The margin on this cargo would be low enough without having to hire someone new. I'm coming down. Don't anyone the fill I get there.'
Yambe struggled out of his captain's chair, knocking the bottle of Second Best down into the guts of the cogitator array around him where the alcohol fizzed and popped against a hot coolant pipe. He swore liberally as he clambered over the chair and through the door in the bulkhead, feeling the ship thrumming painfully through the stained metal under his hand. A previous owner had carved machine-litanies into the girders and pipes, High Gothic pleadings to the Machine God to keep the ship safe and working. They didn't seem to be doing much good.
Through portholes in the corridor Yambe could see the cargo nets cradling massive volumes of building materials, tools, and weaponry, things Epsion Octarius couldn't make for itself. He jogged towards the stem along the long, arching dorsal corridor, feeling all his years and all his weight.
Once, on an armed merchantman out of Balur, he had been there when a plasma reactor vented into three decks, and heard two thousand men boiled in liquid fire. As a captain he had lost seven men when an airlock seal gave way. With each death you see, he believed, a little part of you turns dark and cold, which was why born spacers were all such hard-hearted sons of grox.
The corridor narrowed and split again and again, forming a lattice like a net which held in the bulbous forms of the plasma reactors, engine vents and warp generators.
Yambe forced a vox-bead into one ear. 'Lestin?'
'Found him, boss.' came Lestin's reply. He didn't sound as if this was a good thing.
'Where was he?'
'In about twenty pieces. Someone got him at the airlock, looks like he was running from something.'
'Like what?'
'We're not hanging around to find out. I'm closing the bulkheads around the fourth vent cluster.'
Yambe reached the ship's armoury, a dark little room where the crew's motley collection of weapons were racked up against the walls. Yambe pulled a naval shotgun from the rack and hurriedly snapped six rounds into the weapon's magazine. Shotguns were the weapon of choice of spacecraft where firefights were at close range and guns with greater penetrating power could punch through a wall and damage some vital system. Yambe paused to drag a tattered mesh armour jacket out of a cupboard and pull it over his shoulders. He headed back out into the corridor - the mesh jacket didn't cover much of his bulging stomach but it was better than nothing.
'Lestin, make sure the boys in the reactor crew are pulled back.' voxed Yambe. 'There's enough coolant channels from the vents to the reactors that anything could climb through.'
There was no reply.
'Lestin?'
Static filtered through the vox-bead. The vox-net on the Pecuniam Omnis was on its last legs, and seemed to go on the blink whenever it was most needed. This was what Yambe told himself as he racked the slide on his shotgun and hurried forward.
He heard footsteps approaching, weak and arhythmical. A shadow flickered in the weak glowstrip light and Yambe nearly blew the head off the figure that stumbled towards him.
It was the ship's Navigator. All Navigators were a strain of human - it was impolite to call them mutants, but that's what they were - who could look on the warp and guide a ship through it, and who were universally spindly and weak. The Navigator on the Pecuniam Omnis was no exception, but he was more than just weak - he was wounded. His dark blue Lower House uniform was black with blood, pumping from a wound in his chest, dribbling from his mouth and spattered on the pale skin of his face.
The Navigator, whose name was Krevakalic, fell forward into his arms and nearly knocked him flat on his back. 'What is it?' said Yambe, breathing hard. 'Where?' Krevakalic slumped to the ground and looked up at Yambe from beneath the headband covering the third eye in his forehead, the warp eye.
'... it... she was in... she came for me and Gell first...'
'Gell's dead?' Krevakalic nodded.
That was bad news. Gell, as ship's astropath, was the only person who could transmit a psychic distress signal. Krevakalic coughed and sprayed a gout of warm blood over Yambe. Yambe had to leave him - in a few moments he would die. Yambe had seen it before. His lungs and guts were laid open. It would be crueller to try to save him than to just leave him.
Yambe, meanwhile, had to press on. Not just because he had to find Lestin or any of the other crew, but because the ship's only working saviour pod was towards the stern and Yambe knew he could well have to get off the ship in a hurry.
He left the Navigator sprawled and dying on the floor of the corridor. If Krevakalic begged for Yambe to stay, the words were lost in the froth of blood bubbling from his lips.
The corridor opened up ahead into a wide circle that surrounded one of the plasma reactors, a bulbous cylindrical chamber five storeys high where the ship's energy was generated. The plasma core growled deeply as it provided power to the ship's systems, and white clouds of coolant vapour spurted from the pipes running along the floor and up the curving walls.
There was a body slumped over the closest control console. It was Rani, a kid the Pecuniam Omnis had picked up at their last maintenance stop. Rani was young and stupid and probably a criminal on the run, but he did what he was told and kept his head down. He hadn't deserved to have his head sliced off and his torso cut clean open, but that was what someone had done to him.
Yambe had never seen a man dead like that, killed and bisected as cleanly as if a good butcher had gone to work on him. Yambe looked around and saw Rani wasn't the only one - there was another body draped over the railings around the upper level of walkways surrounding the plasma generator core. Yambe couldn't recognise him but his arms had been cut off and a rust-coloured streak of blood ran down the wall beneath him.
Something moved near the ceiling, scurrying too quickly for Yambe to make out, sweeping up and down as if it were actually running along the curved outer wall instead of along the walkways. Yambe tried to train his shotgun on it but it was gone before he could bring the barrel up.
His men were dying. Something had come onto his ship with the intent of killing everyone they found. They had gone for the
astropath and Navigator first -that meant no distress signal and no escape.
Pirates? Yambe had had his brushes with them. Maybe even xenos - every spacer had heard more than enough tales of heathen aliens preying on Imperial shipping, from the callous and degenerate eldar to the murderous greenskins.
Maybe a more primitive life form. They said that the tyranid hordes that had swarmed over whole planets used fast, deadly creatures with multiple arms as scouts and spies, which could hitch a ride on ships on transit and kill everything on board. There were things that could possess crew members and creatures that could claw their way through the hull, all illustrated in lurid detail in tales told in bars, brothels and holding cells in ports all over the Imperium.
It moved again. Closer this time, further down, scurrying through Yambe's peripheral vision. He knew he couldn't hit it - it had to be something alien, something deadly. He wouldn't end up like Rani. Damn the ship. Gak the cargo. He wasn't going to die out here.
Yambe ran out of the core, ducking his head to get through the low door leading towards the ship's stern. There was one saviour pod that he trusted to work - if no one had taken it already and if a ship passed close enough to pick up the distress signal, it might enable him to survive.
The further into the engine section Yambe got, the more cramped and filthy the ship became. Coolant vapour swirled around his feet. The stinking, oily air clogged up his nose and made his head throb. His breathing was so heavy it hurt - he was too old for this. There was something over the vox. The film of thin static broke up and a man's voice came through, low and strong, resonant, confident.
'Captain Yambe.' it said. 'How much fuel does your ship hold?'
Yambe stopped. Lestin had the vox-bead. That meant the speaker had Lestin, and Lestin had been heading for the stern. Whoever had killed Lestin was between Yambe and the saviour pod.