[Battlefleet Gothic 02] - Shadow Point

by Gordon Rennie - (ebook by Undead)

  “Prepare yourself, mage. They are coming.”

  Siaphas turned at the sound of the eldar lord’s whispering, sibilant voice, the Chaos sorcerer silently angry and alarmed that his mystic senses had not earlier detected the creature’s approach.

  There is still so much I do not know or understand about these things, he thought once more, again questioning Abaddon’s wisdom in forming a pact with such strange and unknowable allies.

  The eldar lord stood there in the dim light of the chamber. The surrounding shadows seemed to enfold around him, making him part of themselves. Siaphas’s Chaos-altered eyes and mystic warp-sight allowed his gaze to see far beyond mere human limits, but the shadows in which these creatures so often surrounded themselves defied even his abilities to properly see through.

  Dark eldar, he thought to himself. An appropriate name, although one he dared not utter in front of them.

  The eldar lord’s name was Kailasa—Kailasa of the Kabal of the Poison Heart, in the clannish and baroque way these creatures termed themselves. He was entirely encased in armour, coloured dark red and streaked through with shots of some strange black material which glittered and shifted when he moved, breaking up the shape of his body. Whether this was for decoration or, more likely, designed for a defensive purpose in battle, was something the Chaos sorcerer had yet to discover. Cruel, mono-molecular edged blades ran down the seams of the limbs of the eldar’s armoured suit, and one hand ended in an ominous, lumpy metal protuberance which could variously be, Siaphas speculated, either an unfamiliar type of hand-held weapon, a mechanical limb attachment, part of the eldar’s armour or even a combination of all three.

  The dark eldar lord wore a full closed helm, styled in the same design as his suit. Like many of his kind, Kailasa seemed to prefer to go about his business masked, even here, aboard the relative safety of his own cruiser vessel. Even so, Siaphas could imagine the set of the kabal commander’s features beneath the burnished and featureless face of the helm: his skin pale and taut across his slender eldar skull, his eyes dark and glittering, full of cruel malice, his lips fixed in a constant and secret arrogant sneer.

  Siaphas had served several lifetimes in the court of the Despoiler and had travelled extensively throughout the daemon worlds of the Eye of Terror at the bidding of both Abaddon and Zaraphiston. He thought he had encountered evil and malicious cunning in all its forms, in the inexhaustible variety of the monstrous and degenerate shapes thrown up by the whim of the Powers of Chaos and lovingly nurtured along and brought to full, abominable fruition by the daemonic forces within the Eye of Terror, but these dark eldar creatures were of a more terrible nature than anything he could ever have imagined. He had seen something of the place Commorragh, their hidden fastness concealed within the vast, mystic labyrinth they called the webway, and he was both awestruck and repelled by the cruel depravities which these beings, unclaimed and unwarped by the tainting glories of Chaos, could devise using nothing more than their own still-mortal intelligence and imagination.

  Pure hate, that was what they were, he had realised from the time he had spent in their company. Their hate was stellar in its pureness and intensity, directed at a pitiless universe which so uncaringly reduced them to such degenerate circumstances; hate directed at those who had once been their race-kin, and who had not been consumed by the same dire fate which had befallen them.

  And hatred too, directed most terribly and secretly at themselves. Siaphas did not yet know the secrets these dark eldar creatures hid about themselves and their past, but he knew that they had once been something far greater than the malice-consumed things which they now were. They secretly hated all that they were and even more secretly coveted all that they had once been, and so they took their pent-up fury out on all other races in the universe.

  Hate consumed them, and, Siaphas was sure, fear drove them. They were filled with an overriding fear of something, something that loomed vast and terrible over them, blotting out all other concerns. Siaphas did not know what the root of this fear was, although he intended to find out, and soon, but already he realised that, in combination with that all-consuming hatred, it was the source of everything which made the dark eldar what they now were.

  Yes, dangerous allies, Siaphas reminded himself. But, potentially, very useful ones too. These creatures were a weapon; a weapon which in the right hands could advance the one who knew how to wield it correctly to unparalleled heights of power.

  Had the Despoiler made a dual mistake in sending him here, the Chaos sorcerer wondered? The first mistake was perhaps trying to make an alliance with such beings, but the second was surely in bringing Siaphas and these creatures together. The Despoiler, in his conceit and arrogance, thought that the dark eldar existed only to serve him and his purposes, but Siaphas already knew that beings such as these did not comply so easily with the plots and plans of others.

  Perhaps, the Chaos sorcerer mused pleasurably to himself, it took a schemer of his own intelligence and vision to truly understand the nature of these dark eldar, and to realise that, with the correct measure of cunning and manipulation, it might be possible to engineer an alliance of mutual benefit with such as they.

  Siaphas smiled again at the thought. Perhaps, after so many thousands of years of dominance, Abaddon the Despoiler was indeed finally beginning to lose his grip, for how else could he have made the potentially fatal error of delivering so potent a weapon as these dark eldar into the hands of one such as Siaphas?

  “My lord Kailasa,” the Chaos sorcerer bowed, displaying all the gestures of false abeyance and respect which had served him so well during centuries of service in the court of Abaddon the Despoiler, while adding an extra and subtle flourish to his body language picked up from his observations of the mannerism of his dark eldar hosts. “You are certain of this? I have cast my own augur-spells, and have seen nothing, although I readily admit my own humble inferiority in such matters, in comparison to whatever scrying methods your lordship and his servants have call on.”

  Behind his burnished mask, Kailasa smiled in amusement. The mon-keigh sought to use him for its own purposes, he knew. It pleased the kabal lord to continue this amusing fiction for the mon-keigh creature’s benefit, if only because it made the end all the more pleasurable when, at the close of the game, the would-be manipulator realised the extent to which he himself had been manipulated right from the very start.

  “We are certain,” Kailasa said simply, knowing how much his answer would only further set the mon-keigh’s mind pondering. “Your own forces are ready?”

  “They are, my lord,” said the mon-keigh, executing another overly-extravagant and crudely-interpreted flourish. “They await my signal. When do we make our move?”

  “We allow our enemies to gather. We allow them to get a sense of each other. We allow their mutual fears and suspicion to grow.”

  “And then what, lord Kailasa?”

  Another bow, another flourish, more ridiculous mon-keigh apeing of eldar mannerisms. Kailasa allowed the question to hang in the air for a few seconds before he finally deigned to answer.

  “And then, mage, we begin the hunt.”

  ELEVEN

  “My compliments, Semper. You command a fine vessel, and lay on an even finer spread at your captain’s table!”

  There was a polite ripple of laughter at Pardain’s joke as the admiral crammed another forkful of Stranivarite borsch meat into his mouth. Red juice dribbled down the man’s chin, and he dabbed at it with a napkin as he soaked up the mirth of his fellow diners.

  Despite appearances, the fat, aged and ruddy-faced rear admiral was nobody’s fool. Lothar Pardain—Lothar Rodriguez Ravensburg-Pardain, to give him his full name—was uncle to the commander of Battlefleet Gothic. Unlike other members of the vast and disparate Ravensburg clan such as captain of the Graf Orlok, Titus von Blucher, however, Pardain owed his position far more to ability and shrewd intelligence than common nepotism. Semper knew his Battlefleet Gothic history, and kn
ew that Pardain, before accepting a senior staff position at Battlefleet Command on Port Maw, had been a highly able and distinguished commander in his own right. His treatises on orbital siege and close in-system fighting were required reading during Semper’s days as a young officer.

  “I don’t know what qualifications you have as a connoisseur, admiral,” said Semper, lifting his glass in acknowledgement to Pardain and raising another polite ripple of laughter from the other diners, “but, coming from the man who commanded the battlecruiser Manifest Destiny during the Vara Campaign and who also carried the day in the Holy Emperor’s favour during the Kierkegaard Heresy, I shall humbly accept your first observation as a compliment of the very highest kind. Your health, admiral.”

  Semper downed the glass—full to the brim with the peppery red Cypra Mundian liqueur which the rear admiral had gifted to the ship when he first came aboard at Elysium—in one swift motion, choking back the taste which, as a young cadet at naval academy, he had quickly come to loathe.

  The others at the table followed suit. Pardain accepted the toast and then downed his measure in the same way, laughing as he slammed the empty glass down on the table before him.

  “Ha, no matter how long it’s been, you don’t forget the taste of raikhi in a hurry, do you, Semper? Emperor only knows why we in the Segmentum Obscuras battlefleets are required by tradition to drink the damnably foul stuff all the time. I once met a Master of Ordnance who told me that the Fury pilots aboard his carrier ship mixed it with promethium fuel from their own fighters for new arrivals aboard ship to drink as some kind of initiation rite into their squadron. Unfortunately, the man was unable to tell me whether, as I suspect, the resulting concoction actually improved the taste of the original drink!”

  There was more laughter from the other diners, but this time it was more sincere and heartfelt, encouraged all the further by Pardain’s own bellowing laughter to the punchline of his own joke. The mood round the table, until now stiff and formal, palpably relaxed and Semper mentally raised another glass to the rear admiral in appreciation of the adroitness at which the wily old command staffer had broken the ice at the meal.

  No, Rear Admiral Lothar Pardain-Ravensburg, holder of the Obscuras Honorifica, the Order of the Gothic Star crimson class and the Golden Seal of Terra, was nobody’s fool, and it was not difficult to understand why Lord Admiral Ravensburg had sent him along on this mission as his own personal envoy and observer.

  Pardain crammed in another mouthful of food—Semper had not been keeping count, but believed that the rear admiral was now on his third plateful—and signalled for one of the nearby attendants to refill his glass, waving away the proffered bottle of raikhi.

  “Away with that devil’s brew, boy,” he jovially told the nervous young ensign. “Find me a carafe or two of amasec or some of that agreeably potent Stranivarite spirit which old Admiral Haasen, Emperor rest his soul, once had the good grace to introduce me to. Search the ship from prow to stern, if need be. I know your captain must have a secret store of the good stuff hidden somewhere!”

  More laughter. More breaking of the ice. Semper glanced down the table, taking stock of the situation. Ulanti, seated several places down, was talking to the grey and gaunt Commodore Neyland, Pardain’s aide-de-camp. Despite the difference in the two men’s ages and temperaments, they seemed to find common cause in both being blueblood aristocrats of suitably fine and venerable stock. Neyland came from some far-flung line of nobility which had an impressively tenacious grasp on power in several star systems within the Gethsemane sub-sector, and Semper looked forward to a full briefing from his second-in-command on anything relevant to their mission by the Port Maw staff officer. Semper assumed that any titbits seemingly dropped by accident by Neyland in the course of casual conversation would be deliberately-revealed information coming, in the end, from Pardain himself.

  Further down the table, Broton Styre and Remus Nyder exchanged a raucous and increasingly lewd series of anecdotes between themselves as the meal continued and the drink continued to flow, while, seated at the far end of the table, even Commissar Kyogen deigned to exchange a few words with his closest dinner neighbour. Semper tried hard not to stare, struck by the strangely random thought that, up until this moment, he doubted that he had ever even seen the relentlessly stern Ship’s Commissar do anything as mundane as actually eating a meal in other human company.

  Occasionally, Kyogen would look up and glower in disapproval towards Semper’s end of the table. Semper, following the commissar’s latest frowning gaze, saw the figure of Chief Petty Officer Maxim Borusa standing to attention in full dress uniform behind where Ulanti was sitting. If the big Stranivarite was aware of the unfriendly attention of the Macharius’s senior Ship’s Commissar, he gave no indication. Semper frowned, sensing coming trouble between the two. He knew something of Borusa’s below-decks activities, but feigned to turn a deaf ear to any reports on the subject which managed to reach him. Such things had always gone on aboard the vessels of His Divine Majesty’s Imperial Navy, and it was a foolish captain who did not realise that these kind of illicit arrangements, if kept within reason, were necessary for the smooth running of any ship and its crew.

  Also, he was forced to admit to himself, he had a grudging admiration for the big hiveworld rogue. He had seen the man in action during the events on Belatis, when Borusa had actually saved his life, and Semper had long ago decided that, even if he were an unrepentant cutthroat gangster and killer, Maxim Borusa was still exactly the kind of man he would want by his side in a tight situation.

  Still, if Commissar Kyogen was gunning for the Macharius’s most valuable and notorious chief petty officer then that was Borusa’s look-out, and Semper couldn’t and wouldn’t intervene if the commissar gathered enough evidence to allow him to take typically swift and summary action against Borusa.

  Mindful of his duties as host, Semper turned his attention back to the rest of the table. His other guests, seated on the opposite side of the long table from the navy officers, were noticeably less ebullient in their conversation habits. Semper imagined that the servants of the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition were not usually selected for service in the Imperium’s most arcane and secretive organisation with their more garrulous qualities in mind. Nevertheless, Werner Maeler seemed to have struck up a tentative exchange with the Inquisition man seated across from him early in the meal, and now the two men were deep in conversation. Semper recognised the man as Haller Stavka, Inquisitor Horst’s chief lieutenant. When the inquisitor and his retinue came aboard, and even before Semper had been introduced to the man, he recognised Stavka for the ex-arbiter he clearly once had been. The man was in mufti, wearing a plain black and grey bodyglove and a rough woollen waistcoat, but, even without seeing and recognising the tell-tale justice eagle aquila tattoo on his firmly-muscled shoulder, there was no mistaking him for anything other than the highly capable and no doubt brutally lethal servant of the Imperium which he most assuredly was.

  Inquisitor Horst, seated beside his chief lieutenant and directly across from Pardain, was still predictably much of an enigma to the officers and crew of the Macharius. Tall, thin and greying—he showed all the signs of expensive and subtle rejuve treatment, and Semper could only make a haphazard guess at his age as being somewhere between sixty or as much as four or five times that figure—he was the typical vidpict propaganda drama image of an Imperial inquisitor, right down to the Inquisition skull emblem seal of office which he wore upon his black mesh-leather coat, even at the dinner table.

  Semper knew that many Imperial inquisitors possessed some form of psychic ability. Semper had the typical loyal Imperial servant’s quiet dread of those touched by the mystic properties of the warp and the things which lurked within it. Despite this, his position as a commander of a vessel of the Imperial Navy meant that he was frequently forced to consort with psychically-endowed Imperial servants such as astropaths and Navigators, and he was aware of the strange and unsett
ling sense of otherness which surrounded psykers like an invisible cloak. He got no such sense from Horst on the several occasions he had met him since the inquisitor and his retinue came aboard the Macharius. Nevertheless, it was seemingly some kind of prescient sense which caused Horst to glance up at that moment and catch Semper watching him.

  Horst held his gaze. Sensing a conversational opening, Semper made his play.

  “I trust the quarters you and your staff have been given are comfortable and adequate for your purposes, inquisitor?”

  “They are most satisfactory, commodore. In return, I trust your officers haven’t been too discomforted by having to share quarters for the duration of this voyage?”

  “Not as far as I know,” answered Semper, all too aware of the endless litany of complaints of the thirty or forty of his junior officers who had been evicted from their quarters to make room for Horst and his servants.

  “I’m curious, though, inquisitor,” continued Semper, “I admit to having encountered few servants of the Inquisition during my own time of service in the navy, but I wasn’t aware that inquisitors travelled with such large personal staffs.”

  Horst paused, laying down his glass of amasec. “The Inquisition is a broad church, commander,” he answered, looking Semper in the eye. “We all serve the same purpose, my brethren and I, although our methods and philosophies may differ. Some philosophies more than others, perhaps,” he added as a musing afterthought, taking another sip of the fiery spirit. “While some of my brother inquisitors travel almost incognito and surround themselves with only the smallest band of followers seconded to their service, I believe that the purposes of the Inquisition and the Imperium as a whole are best served by an inquisitor’s full use of the power and authority invested in him.”

  “How many do you have in your personal staff?” asked Pardain, joining the conversation.