The troupe exchanged nervous, frightened glances, none daring to share their thoughts with any others, but all of them dwelling on the same terrible, awe-filled knowledge.
The burning god walked abroad, unbidden and uncontrolled. The deadly fury which was the avatar of the Bloody-Handed God was awake, and death and catastrophe surely followed in its wake.
PART TWO
CONVERGENCE
TEN
The planet lay somewhere out in the barren reaches beyond the Quinrox Sound, orbiting a dwindling pair of binary dwarfs. Both stars were dying, one already all but extinguished, slowly collapsing into a pulsar and beaming out its distress as a long and silent electronic death-scream to an uncaring universe. Its twin faced its own imminent death with a little more dignity, diminishing quietly but steadily over the long millennia, the stellar heat of its nuclear fires fading and dying, the very substance of its aeons-old body dissipating and fading away in faint, fiery ribbons into the surrounding void.
The world had two remote and distant siblings. Once it had had more, but the fierce gravitic forces exerted by the binary twins had long since taken their toll, and all that now remained of these worlds were thin garlands of broken rock, strung out in long, elliptical orbits round their murderously uncaring parent stars. One of the remaining siblings swung about in an eccentric orbit of both stars, captured in the orbit of first one then the other, alternately freezing and burning as the parent stars fought a jealous gravity tide tug of war over their errant child, each seeking to draw it as close to itself as it could. It was completely uninhabitable, rent constantly by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and gravity storms which stripped away whole segments of its ravaged planetary surface. The process of its inevitable destruction was already far advanced, and, in time, it too would end its days as a scattered belt of asteroid fields, forever orbiting in mute testimony to its two parents’ murderous rivalry.
The other planetary sibling was an adopted orphan: a lone cosmic wanderer, really more a giant meteorite or rogue moon, which had long ago been captured in the twins’ eager grasp and had since assumed an eccentric and wild orbit on the remote fringes of the system, resisting its adoptive parents’ insistent but gradually weakening pull and remaining far beyond both the knowledge of its two siblings and that invisible but fixed point past which no life could ever flourish upon its dismal and barren surface.
No, the planet drifted alone, safely secured in a narrow marginal orbit between its two warring parents, heedless of the fate which had befallen its less fortunate siblings.
It had had several names in its time. Names given to it by the ancient races that had trodden the stars long before the birth of humanity, and which had built their monuments and cities upon its surface. Those races were long gone now. They had become less than the drifting dust which was now mostly all that remained of those same supposedly indestructible cities and monuments. After these ancient ones had come the eldar, following in the footsteps of these older races and seeking to recapture their lost glories for themselves. For a while, the eldar had flourished, achieving many of their highest and most secret aims, and then, in one brief but terrible instant, they had fallen, betrayed by their own hubris and secret, dreadful weakness. After the cataclysm, the ones who were left had mostly abandoned worlds such as this, retreating into their scattered and drifting craftworlds and often closing and sealing behind them the webway portals which led to these now dead and empty worlds.
The planet’s surface had known the tread of eldar feet since then, but these new ones had come like thieves in the night, moving swiftly and in fear where once their ancestors had walked proud and confident. They had entered the halls and homes of their ancestors, exploring them in a manner more akin to nervous and over-awed tomb raiders than as presumptive heirs to their ancestors’ fallen glories.
After the eldar had come the humans, briefly and almost insignificantly. They had come several thousand years ago, just another explorator team investigating the surface of another dead and empty world. They had made their studies, measured the monuments and scratched around amongst the time-worn ruins, tabulated their findings, then had left again with barely a backwards glance. Just another dead and empty world, they surmised, just another one of thousands of such worlds within their Imperium, an Imperium which, unknown to them, had been built in wilful ignorance upon the ruins of so many other, greater and more ancient civilisations which had ruled the galaxy long before the age of man.
Before leaving, though, they had given the world a name: a name which had only recently been remembered for the first time in centuries. Orders from the office of no less a personage than Lord Admiral Ravensburg himself had sent anxious teams of scribes scurrying into the deepest labyrinth reaches of the Administratum archives on Port Maw in search of the urgently required information. The dusty and long-forgotten transcripts of that ancient explorator mission had been successfully found and recovered, and, once again, the planet’s human-given name, a name most probably assigned to it at random by some bored and now long-dead explorator scribe, had been spoken aloud for perhaps the first time ever.
Stabia, they called it. A forgotten and utterly insignificant world on the remotest fringes of the Quinrox Sound, and upon which was focussed the gaze of a select handful of the most powerful men in the Gothic sector. And, beyond them, the secret gaze of others, non-human as well as those who, no matter what they had once been, were now something less than human, was also turned towards Stabia.
The world continued serene and undisturbed in its long slumber, but perhaps even it itself was aware of the forces now descending on it. They came through the warp and through the myriad, twisting paths of the webway, racing towards the prize.
Towards Stabia. Towards the moment of convergence. Towards the shadow point.
Once, long ago, the world now known as Stabia had known the touch of greatness, as the ancient eldar races and those who had sought to follow in their footsteps had walked its surface and left their hidden marks upon it. Now, and soon, Stabia would know something of greatness once more, for it would be upon its lifeless surface that the fate of the Gothic sector, of hundreds of inhabited worlds, and, perhaps the entire Imperium of Mankind itself, would be decided.
In their cells and reliquaries all over the Gothic sector, blind astropath seers consulted the ever-mutable faces of the sacred cards of the Imperial tarot, and paused in fear and wonder at what they found.
In the dome of the crystal seers on far-distant craftworld An-Iolsus, where the dreaming souls of dead eldar gazed forever up through the transparent diamond skin of the dome high above them at the panoply of stars, a faint current of unease breezed through the crystalline forest, disturbing the dreamers’ reveries.
In his secure and heavily-guarded sanctum buried deep within the decks of his venerable battle barge flagship Harbinger of Doom, Abaddon the Despoiler listened to the prophecy-whispers of his most favoured pet daemon-things and looked out into the face of the warp with his Chaos-given mystic sight. His plans were well advanced now. His allies were not to be trusted, and would certainly betray or abandon him when it best suited their own purposes, he knew, but the factor had long ago been taken into consideration, and the necessary precautions taken. After all, he reminded himself, smiling briefly at the thought, why else would he have entrusted such a task to a treacherous viper such as Siaphas?
Still, there were uncharacteristic doubts in the mind of the Chaos Warmaster. The daemon-prophecies were confused and contradictory, while his own mystic sight could make little sense of the blurred and shadowy future-images which moved fleetingly across the face of the warp. Deep down, the Chaos Warmaster was troubled. His daemon sword Drach’nyen, hanging on the wall in its jewel-encrusted scabbard of tan-hide Space Marine skin, sensed its master’s disquiet and made a long, keening sound of displeasure. Beyond the void-shielded entrance to Abaddon’s quarters, his phalanx of Black Legion Terminator bodyguards heard the sound and looked at each othe
r in apprehension, understanding what it meant. The command would not come from the Despoiler for perhaps another minute or two, but already one of the Terminators had activated his vox-link to the slave decks below to order living flesh to be brought up to feed the sword’s blood-thirst and help assuage the Warmaster’s mood.
Elsewhere, in a place remote from but connected to all other places, other minds and eyes looked at the hidden face of events still to come. They saw the same shadows, the same blurred confusion, but these watchers were unlike those others. They and their kind were masters of the shadows, long at home amongst the dark and hidden places of the universe, and they understood the shadow images as all others did not. They saw the shape of the future and they rejoiced at the death and slaughter to come, for it was all that they had anticipated.
Or, at least, so they thought.
By warp and webway, the players in the coming drama drew closer towards the meeting place. Stabia awaited them. The fhaisorr’ko, the shadow point, awaited them too. As they approached, their fatelines become even more complex and entangled. The many distorted, mocking faces presented by the mystic shadow point to any who tried to divine its secrets now blurred and changed again, the patterns of intersecting fatelines changing by the moment. Perhaps the very oldest of the ones in the dome of crystal seers, the ones whose life memories reached beyond the dreadful time of the Fall, could have understood what was happening, but they were mostly gone now, their spirits completely subsumed within the soul stream of the infinity circuit, and their voices had not been heard since before even wise old Kariadryl was born. The knowledge was gone now, just another marker on the path of a dying race’s slow slide into extinction, and so no eldar alive in the last few thousand years could have known the secret understood by their forebears.
The fhaisorr’ko itself is a trap. It does not hide the future from view, for there is no pre-determined future to conceal. Try to penetrate its mysteries and it will show you the future which most favours you, but the shape of that future is no more real than the phantom images which conceal it.
Perhaps Kariadryl understood something of the true dangerous nature of the shadow point, but these darker ones, who had fallen far further and far more terribly than their one-time craftworld brethren ever had, did not, and, in their cruel arrogance and conceit, they had already become entrapped by the beguiling falsehood of the fhaisorr’ko. They did not know what the ancient pre-Fall eldar had known: the future within the fhaisorr’ko is not set. Anyone within the shadow point can, by their own actions, change their future and that of all others. Nothing is known. Nothing is predetermined. All is there to be won by any of the participants in the coming shadow play.
In the enclosed shell of his armoured strategium, the crippled human husk that was Erwin Ramas floated in an all-enveloping and protecting environment of synthetic amniotic fluid, surrounded by the myriad of wires, tubes, nourishment feeds and tendril-like mechadendrites which kept him alive and connected to the living mind of his vessel. He was asleep, or at least the nearest thing to sleep he would ever know, but, while he slept, that part of him which was so intimately involved with the innermost workings of his ship was awake and active. It communed with the Drachenfels’s machine-mind, browsing through the never-ending stream of information flowing through the ship’s mighty logic engines. It assessed surveyor and auspex readings, and kept half an eye on the ongoing status of the ship’s weapons and defence systems. It monitored too the steady input of information from the ship’s non-mechanical components: duty logs and crew assessments from his officers, damage repair updates from the vast teams of ratings still slaving round the clock to make good the last of the damage suffered in the battle against the greenskins.
Meanwhile, as that mind impulse-linked part of him continued to function, the human part of him slept, reliving the trauma of old battles and old wounds.
“Enemy contact four hundred kilometres to our rear, and starboard! Sigmuth’s balls, look how fast it’s coming in. Where the hell were our close-range defence augurs? How did he get in so close to us?”
For perhaps the thousandth time in the last one hundred and fifty years, Erwin Ramas heard the panicked voice of his second-in-command as it rang out across the bridge of the ship. Vhoten Kamares, that had been his name. A good enough number two, Ramas had always thought, but too prone to fright, and almost certainly never destined to rise any higher in Imperial Navy service than the rank he already held.
For perhaps the thousandth time, Ramas turned to look at the image on the bank of augur screens. The image captured upon them was simultaneously beguiling and terrifying. The eldar ship raced towards them with its solar sails fully extended, and, for a moment, the pragmatic Ramas was uncharacteristically reminded of the old spaceman’s myths of the vacuum valkyries, vast, angel-like creatures which drifted serenely amongst the scattered wreckage of the after-math of space battles, gathering up the souls of the dead and dying aboard the burned-out hulks and carrying them off to their earned place by the side of the Emperor. The ominous black maws of the ship’s forward-mounted torpedo tubes, however, and the clear and deadly intent with which the vessel bore down on its intended prey, gave immediate lie to this particular piece of fanciful spacer legend.
“Hard to starboard,” Ramas heard himself say, for perhaps the thousandth time. “Deploy starboard side turrets quintus to octus, and let’s give those xenos bastards a good, clean taste of lance fire!”
They were patrolling the trade route circuit between Sicyon and Bladen in the Lysades sub-sector. Nothing too special or demanding. Just another routine patrol mission to fly the aquila eagle standard across one small part of the Emperor’s domain to assure or remind the Emperor’s nervous and/or potentially rebellious subjects that the forces of the Imperium were still keeping a careful watch over their worlds.
The eldar attack had come out of nowhere, unprovoked and without warning. They had no way of knowing what the alien ship was even doing here, on the fringes of the sparsely-populated and unimportant Lament system. Ramas doubted they ever would find out, because, as soon as the attack began, it became his firm intention to reduce the alien vessel to just so much drifting space debris.
Now, as Ramas watched the images projected on his bridge’s augur screens, he felt the first stirrings of secret doubt about whether he could make good on that promise. The eldar ship seemed to flicker in and out of existence, its image actually jumping confusedly from one place to another in space. At times, Ramas saw multiple images appearing around it, often merging and blurring into each other. Whatever damnable alien technology the vessel was using to defend itself, it had the same confusing effect on his gunners’ targeting systems as it did on the human eye. Lance beams cut through space around the oncoming ship, probing in vain to find it. Ramas saw one energy beam harmlessly pass right through what he would have sworn had been the real target and not one of its phantom after-images.
Ghosts, he thought to himself. It’s like trying to fight ghosts.
The catastrophe, when it happened, came without warning. As far as Ramas and his officers were aware, they had never even known the eldar ship had launched any torpedoes, not until the brace of missiles, moving almost impossibly fast and seemingly undetectable to the Imperium vessel’s senses, struck the base of the Drachenfels’s command tower.
An explosion, ferocious, sudden and terrifying, ripped through the floor of the ship’s bridge. Ramas saw his second-in-command decapitated by a flying piece of torn deck-plating, and then the blast wave struck him and blew him across the entire deck, smashing him with bone-crushing force against the far wall and impaling him upon the beak point of a gargoyle-faced atmo-breather pipe. Incredibly, Ramas struggled for a few seconds to pull himself off the thing, before realising, just as a second and more powerful blast ripped up through the gaping hole in the floor, that the effort was futile since the first blast had removed his left arm and both of his legs.
For the thousandth time, Ramas saw t
he eruption of flame from the torpedo-destroyed decks below. For the thousandth time, he saw it burst across the command deck in a living wall of flame, immolating screaming officers, crewmen and adepts as it swept towards him.
For the thousandth time, he opened his mouth to scream too, but all was lost in the hungry roar of flame as the heat consumed most of his lungs and burned away the flesh of his face.
His last conscious memory, before he mercifully passed out, before the rescue crews cut their way into the wreckage of the command deck and found him impossibly hanging there, barely alive, was of seeing the image of their attacker on a cracked but still-functioning augur screen, as the eldar ship executed a graceful, looping turn around its victim and moved off dispassionately towards the system’s edge, swiftly disappearing into the blackness of space.
They had had the Drachenfels at their mercy, and, in their supreme arrogance, had disdained to deliver the killing blow.
A thousand times he had relived these memories. A thousand times he had relived every moment of the crippling of his ship and the destruction of his body. And, a thousand times, he swore he would one day exact his revenge for what they had done to him and his ship.
Fully awake now, he linked his consciousness into his ship’s gunnery systems, for the thousandth time rerunning the unique firing solutions and target pattern equations which he had long ago laid into the ship’s logic engines. Trapped as he was in this wreck of a body inside his strategium home, he had had plenty of time and opportunity to prepare for another encounter with the eldar in the last century and a half, should any of their kind ever cross his path again.
Yes, just let the arrogant alien bastards come, he told himself, smiling a lipless smile. Next time, he and his ship would be ready for them.
[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point Page 13