[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  All this he was able to see, but nothing else. The shadow point spun faster, throwing a shroud of darkness around itself, the darkness reaching out towards the bright goal of the farseer’s mind. With a wrench, he tore himself free of its grasp, returning his mind and soul to the here and now.

  He stood still for a moment, taking comfort in the psychic refuge of the dome, dwelling on what he had just seen. Only some of these visions would come to pass, but which ones? And there was something else too, something still hidden within the obscuring deadness of the shadow point. Something abominable, and yet also perversely familiar. A thought, or something less than a thought, a vague and nameless dread which he dare not even give proper form to, worked itself loose from the place where he kept his deepest and most secret fears.

  “Shea nudh Asuryanish ereintha Asuryanat,” he intoned to himself. May the blessings of Asuryan protect the children of Asuryan from abomination.

  His invocation of the most potent and dire of all the prayers to the greatest and oldest of the eldar gods sent a rustling shiver of psychic alarm through the spirit-minds of the dome. Kariadryl laid a hand on the crystalline bark of one of the nearby trees, recognising as his flesh touched it the psychic resonance of the bonesinger Cathrhal, who had once been a rival of Kariadryl’s for the love of his eventual first soulmate Agilthya, and who had saved his life a century later, fending off a human chainsword blow which would have otherwise decapitated the injured Kariadryl.

  “Rest easy, brother,” he whispered. “Forgive me. I did not mean to disturb your dreams with my thoughtless words.”

  A motionless current stirred through the dreaming minds of the spirits of the dome. Kariadryl felt it, and felt the craft-world’s concern, concern for him and for the future of them all. He mind-spoke thoughts of reassuring calm, and felt the mood of the infinity circuit ease in return. He made his way to the exit, turned and bowed respectfully one last time to the forest of glittering, diamantine trees.

  “Farewell, old friends. An-Iolsus commands, but I look forward to resting here a while with you again when I return.”

  As he left, he heard the disquiet in the spirit-minds’ voiceless murmurings, and the faint, sad whispers of final farewell from those who in life had been closest to him. He sighed to himself. Perhaps a century or two ago, he could still have easily guarded his thoughts from the spirits within the craft-world’s infinity circuit, but this gift seemed now to have deserted him. They had seen what he had seen, and they saw and understood the lie in the words he had just spoken.

  FOUR

  Half the galaxy away, another craftworld drifted serenely in the dark, uncharted places between the stars. Its name was unknown to the librarian-scribes of the Inquisition’s Ordo Xenos, whose task it was to compile secret lists of such things. Its history was untouched by contact with the Imperium, for it lay far beyond the Imperium’s borders, and its inhabitants neither knew nor cared about the squabbling affairs of such a vulgar, upstart race. It lay almost at the very limits of the webway, and there were few of those ancient routes which still connected to it.

  And so, by choice or circumstance—none within the craft-world could remember, so long ago was it—they existed in almost complete isolation. Detached and unruffled, there they existed at the hour of the sunset passing of their race in a state more akin to that of the long and blissful days enjoyed by their ancestors in the time before the great, self-inflicted cataclysm.

  Aloof. Idyllic. Untroubled.

  So it was that the young aspect initiate drew disapproving glances and reproachful mind-thought queries from his elders as he hurried along the tranquil, pearl-floored passages of the craftworld’s outermost western spiral. The turbulent emotion which filled his as yet untutored mind communicated itself into the minds of those around him, and, after a moment’s thought, many of them would have identified it as something similar to panic, or the closest equivalent to it that an eldar mind could produce.

  This note of discordant and unfamiliar emotion transmitted itself through the craftworld, jumping from one eldar mind to another, and so, by the time the young initiate reached his destination, the one he had been searching for had anticipated his arrival.

  She stood waiting for him in a gallery lined with wraith-bone sculptures. The delicate psi-material of the figurine shapes was sensitive to the mood of nearby minds, and they writhed and contorted into unfamiliar and anxiety-ridden shapes as the initiate approached. A display of crystalbone chimes shook in sympathetic distress at the sculptures’ plight, but were hushed into calmed silence by a mind-command from the gallery’s sole occupant.

  In his panic, the initiate forgot the normal courtesies due to his craftworld’s most high-born.

  “My lady, there has been an incident at the Shrine of Kaela Mensha Khaine. The shrine has been opened!”

  “The Shrine of the Bloody-Handed God?” It took the eldar noblewoman a moment to remember where the shrine was located within the vast labyrinth of the craftworld. She had never visited the place herself. Few of the tens of thousands aboard the craftworld ever had. They maintained a full force of guardians raised from amongst the population, and every eldar here was fully prepared to sacrifice their lives in defence of their craftworld, but the ways of war were not their ways, and there were few amongst her people who chose to dedicate themselves to the worship of the eldar’s dark and enigmatic god of war.

  “How can this be? Who would dare intrude on that place without risking the anger of the god?”

  When the initiate answered, it was in a voice barely more than a terror-struck whisper. “My lady, you do not understand. There has been no intrusion. The shrine has been opened from the inside, and the chamber beyond is empty. The avatar is gone.”

  The gallery chamber was filled with the sound of the crystalbone sculptures, all of them chiming urgently and without harmony. They would chime for many days, untamed by the sternest of thought-commands, sending out an unheard warning to the cosmos.

  Let the enemies of the children of Asuryan beware. The Bloody-Handed God is on his way.

  FIVE

  “Spook? Hesh? Obscura? Morpho? Kalma? Spur? Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got it. Big battle coming. If we’re all gonna die, might as well get high!”

  Maxim Borusa had to admit that his new front-man was good. Good at handling the customers, good at handling the merchandise, good at spotting troublemakers. And not too greedy either. He’d only once caught the little creep stealing more of the takings that he should have, and a few minutes with Galba and Corba and a couple of broken fingers—nothing too severe, Maxim didn’t want to damage a potentially very valuable new employee—had been enough to sort out that little misunderstanding.

  Yeah, Maxim thought, as he sat at the back of the abandoned, lower-deck gallery that he and his crew had claimed for their own, the guy was good. In fact, life was good generally. He sat back on a crate throne from where he could keep a careful eye on the proceedings. His tunic, emblazoned with the gold-fringed red rank sash of a senior chief petty officer, lay nearby, as did his chainsword belt and scabbard and twin bolt pistol holster, all of them within easy reach should he have any urgent need for them. A ship-whore, her eyes filled with the tell-tale glaze of tajii root intoxication, sat on his lap, giggling and squirming playfully in response to the idle movements of one of his big, paw-like hands beneath her sequined blouse.

  Girls like this one weren’t allowed aboard naval ships, Maxim knew, but, of course, neither were many other things that people needed and wanted, like all those little illicit luxuries which helped make life aboard one of His Divine Majesty’s warships slightly less hellish, and so there were always openings for a smart operator to do well for himself.

  Yeah, life was good, Maxim thought. When he first came aboard the Macharius he had been just another prison world conscript, kept in chains and with a life expectancy that could probably have been measured in months. Now, six years later, he was one of the most senior non-commis
sioned officers amongst a crew of almost thirteen thousand, a familiar face on the command deck, a figure of fear and respect throughout the vessel, and, here below decks, the biggest fixer and criminal operator aboard the ship. He had a crew of almost fifty answering directly to him, all of them hand-picked by him. Hard, brutal sons of bitches, every one of them, and, if need be, he could probably call up a full force of three or four times that number. His own private army, loyal only to him.

  Not that he usually had need of such a show of strength, of course. There were plenty on the bridge who knew what he got up to here below-decks, but as long as you played it cool, didn’t get too greedy and didn’t leave too many bodies lying around the place as a result of one too many disagreements with your business rivals, then they were generally happy to turn a blind eye to what was going on.

  Yeah, old Captain Semper wasn’t a bad sort, Maxim thought. A bit of a cold fish, maybe, your typical Cypra Mundian officer nob really, but he knew what the score was. He knew that, to keep order aboard ship, even the harsh, unforgiving type of Imperial Navy order, you had to leave a few outlets for the ordinary crew to blow off some steam.

  Steam control, that’s what Maxim liked to think he provided. He remembered the steam tunnels below the hives of Stranivar, filled with the excess bleed from the torrents of thermal energy that was pumped up from the bubbling, magma-heated, sunless seas deep below the planet’s surface, energy which provided much-needed heat and power to the giant, ancient hive structures. Good places to hide from the Arbites bastards, those tunnels, and good places to take shelter during the triannual Big Chill season, when the hiveworld’s eccentric orbit took it away from its sun and out towards the heatless depths of the planetary system.

  That was when the deadly cold of the planet’s atmosphere cut through the hive’s ancient, battle-scarred adamantium walls in a way which no lance beam ever could, penetrating down into the deepest levels of the hive. You had to fight for the safest places in the steam tunnels, fight over displaced gangers and the ghulaki scavenger things which made their permanent homes in the tunnels. If you were unlucky, you and your entire gang might be suddenly scalded to death in an explosive rushing of super-heated steam which often blasted at random through some of the runnels, but it was still better than freezing your bolters off in the dismal under-hive regions above.

  There were other things down there in the steam tunnels, servitor mechanoids which went about their endless tasks completely oblivious to the gangers around them, even to the extent of carrying out their work in the middle of pitched inter-gang gunfights. The gangers knew well enough to leave these things alone, for they maintained the ancient steam pressure systems throughout the tunnel network, and any attempt to interfere or damage these systems or their custodians could lead to catastrophe.

  Steam control, that’s how Maxim saw his role aboard the Macharius. Just like those servitors, operating the systems that keep the steam pressure within safe limits. And if he made a little on the side for himself? Well, that was only fair, wasn’t it, considering the risks and effort involved in what he did?

  Everyone understood that. Everyone except that silver skull bastard, Kyogen. The Macharius’s senior fleet commissar was gunning for him, Maxim knew. He had his people all throughout the ship, on every deck and in every crew team: spies and informers, reporting everything they heard back to the big, scar-faced commissar. Maxim had already found three of them within the ranks of his own organisation, and had taken appropriate action. Even when not in battle, there were at least a dozen deaths a week on the Macharius, an unremarkable statistic which passed as the normal hazards of duty aboard a navy vessel. Crewmen crushed by heavy machinery in the torpedo room or flight bays, crewmen vaporised by energy surges while working amongst the innards of the ship’s power systems, or even, for those wretches unfortunate enough to be consigned to the lowest decks where the ship’s atmosphere processing systems were at their least dependable, suffocated, poisoned, frozen or killed by sudden air pressure changes.

  Lots of ways to die, smiled Maxim, and lots of ways to conveniently and blamelessly dispose of Kyogen’s little spies.

  Like this one, he thought, running another scarred hand over the soft flesh beneath the girl’s top. Yes, it had been remarkably convenient how she had turned up at just the right time, arriving, so she claimed, as smuggled cargo aboard a lighter craft during their last re-crewing stopover at Luxor III. She was a looker, he had to admit. Just his type—also convenient, he noted—and athletic too, but she liked to ask questions, and she liked to be with him whenever he wasn’t on duty on the command deck. She especially liked to be with him at times like this, when he had business to conduct.

  A honey-trap, he thought to himself. Why, Commissar Kyogen, you sly old goat. And I thought you were too much of an Emperor-loving puritan to stoop to such tricks!

  Still, he knew he would have to do something about this one. He sighed to himself. It really was a pity, since he actually quite liked having her around. No doubt the coming battle would provide a few convenient opportunities to settle the problem.

  As if on cue, a series of deep, sonorous chimes rang out, broadcast through the ship by the inter-deck vox-callers. Three chimes. Battle imminent.

  Speaking for himself, Maxim liked battles. Not just personally, but professionally, too. Good for business, a great big battle. Half the crew aboard any warship liked to get hopped up on narc-stimms just before a battle. Narc-stimms took the edge off the fear of knowing that, at almost any second, you and the other thousands of poor bastards around you stood every chance of being obliterated from existence without a moment’s warning. Others wanted something that would help them tune into the madness of battle, figuring their best chances of survival lay in adding to the insanity rather than trying to isolate themselves from it. Maxim didn’t care.

  Whatever his customers’ preferences, he had the product to match their needs. Raima and obscura for the ones who needed to pretend it was all happening to someone else; heavy-duty hallucinogenics like morph, zziz and halo for the ones who needed to pretend it was happening in a completely different universe to the personal universe-for-one they were inhabiting. “Slaught, spur and havoc for the ones, mostly armsmen and the members of boarding assault parties, who wanted a little something extra in their bloodstreams and nervous systems to give them that added boost for when they met the enemy face to face.

  The warning caused a stir amongst the line of customers, and they pushed forward, eager to get what they had come for and return to their stations before the next warning sounded.

  Not being at your battle stations by the time the two-chime warning sounded was a capital offence, one ruthlessly enforced by Commissar Kyogen with his usual efficient, favourless zeal.

  “Back! Get back!” warned Galba, waving a snub-nosed autopistol at the line. “Plenty for everyone, and plenty of time to get it. Kolba, his twin/cousin/lover/ganger-brother—Maxim was never sure of the exact nature of the relationship between the two of them, and didn’t much care—stood nearby, backing up Galba’s actions with a meaningful sweep of the long barrel of his shotcannon. The crowd backed off respectfully, knowing from experience of too many close-combat boarding actions exactly the kind of slaughter the weapon could achieve in a confined, target-filled space like the one they were in now.

  “Next!” called the front-man, beckoning forward the man at the head of the line. “What you looking for, friend?”

  “Slaught, as much as you got. The red vial mix only, none of that kalma-cut stuff you tried to sell me last time.”

  The front-man looked at the customer, coolly appraising him. “Man knows his “slaught. Red Dragon mix it is. I know how much you boys in the enginarium like to ride the dragon.”

  Maxim looked over, the exchange catching his interest. The customer was squat and heavy-set, his dark-coloured skin oddly taut and withered in the manner typical of those who worked in the ship’s engineering sections, where the heat and radia
tion from the ship’s fiery plasma reactor hearts could penetrate the thickest plasarmoured work suits to braise and burn flesh.

  The enginarium sections weren’t part of Maxim’s turf. They belonged to a senior Engineering rating called Sejarra, a limping, squint-eyed little runt who was Maxim’s main rival in the steam control business. Maxim had given Sejarra that limp. Next time, the big hive worlder promised himself, his aim would be better.

  Kolba shot a querying glance at his boss. Maxim nodded the okay. Sejarra controlled the narc-stimm supply business in the enginarium, but if this guy wanted to buy from Maxim, or, as the quantities he was buying here seemed to suggest, set himself up freelance in the same business, then that was his lookout. Independent operators trying to set up on their own in Sejarra’s turf had a nasty habit of falling into plasma furnaces.

  The front-man caught the exchange between the crew-boss and his pet killer. “Okay, friend,” he said to the customer. “So what you got to offer us in exchange? No navy scrip, and none of that stuff they call currency on half the mudballs in this arse end of a sub-sector. Like for like, that’s what we like to see.”

  The engineer moved forward, laying a cloth-wrapped bundle on the makeshift table-crate before the front-man. Maxim’s man unwrapped it, revealing an oddly-wrought bolt pistol. He held it up, showing it to Maxim. With its brass markings and ornamentation, gargoyle-mouthed muzzle end and strange hand-grip that didn’t seem quite made to fit a normal human hand, it was clearly a Chaos weapon. Maxim knew there was a high demand for these things, and that he could probably trade it for a small fortune at the next port world they visited. There were always plenty of mincing, rear echelon Munitorium adepts or reservist Imperial Guard officers keen to acquire such trophies, no doubt so they could display them to swooning, weak-kneed aristocratic ladies and tell them heroic tales of how they took it from the dead hand of some Chaos warlord they had just slain in single combat.