by Nick Kyme
There, amid the sudden and alien calm, something had begun down on the dungeon decks. Moving like a tide, radiating like a nova, inside the iron holding cells the massed psyker cargo awoke as one, burning out the neuroshackles that held them in check, the potent dampening filters pumped into their bloodstreams becoming weak and ineffective. The Validus’s astropathic choir began to scream.
There was weeping and bellowing and—
Silence.
~The final entry ends here,~ signed Sister Thessaly. ~There is nothing else.~
Leilani felt sickened, as if an invisible patina of dirt was suddenly coating her flesh. The idea of rampant, uncontrolled psykers in such number was utterly abhorrent to her. It was everything the Sisterhood stood against, and it made her feel soiled to think she was in close proximity to such a thing.
Fighting down a shudder, the novice-sister found her gaze drifting up to the gantry above the bridge platform. There was a single hatch up there, a thick disc of metal set in a heavy ring of black iron; beyond it would be a narrow tunnel leading to the astropath habitat, where the ship’s tame psykers would parse messages for transmission across the interstellar deeps. Such sections of a starship were always heavily shielded, for even the smallest amount of telepathic interference could upset their delicate sensory paths; aboard a Black Ship, the matter was magnified a thousandfold.
Only the most highly trained, the most tightly controlled of the astropath kindred could ever serve aboard a vessel that was such a riot of psi-noise, and even then the life expectancy for them was a fraction of that of their fellows aboard normal ships of the line. Even their sanctorum, isolated from the rest of the craft through advanced technologies, energy fields and thick walls of psi-resistant metals, was pale shelter for them. Leilani could not help but wonder what had transpired in there after this… awakening.
She looked back to find the Oblivion Knight watching her. Sister Amendera gestured in BattleMark, having clearly come to the same conclusion. ~Investigate and evaluate~
Grimly, the novice accepted her orders with a nod and shucked off her cloak, so that she could more easily enter the narrow conduit overhead. Removing her bolt pistol, Leilani checked the weapon and reached for the access ladder, willing her hands not to tremble.
The hatch yawned open to present her with a shallow, gloomy tunnel lit from the far end by pale blue illuminators. Without looking back, she ascended, leading with her pistol. She smelled decay in the stalled, stagnant air.
The chamber was spherical and smooth-walled, the faint light spilling from oval lumes arranged in a ring around the interior equator.
The inner surface of the murky chamber glittered gently where intricate lines of microscopic text ranged around from pole to pole.
Leilani felt a moment of confusion, of wrongness, and in the next second she had the reason why.
‘Gravity,’ she said aloud. ‘There’s gravity in here.’
Usually, the astropaths aboard a craft of this class would live in a null-gee bubble, cut off from the graviton generators of the rest of the ship so that they could float freely without concern for the vagaries of something so base, so mundane as walking upon their feet.
But here, the nullifying field was inactive, and she sought and found a sparking control panel some distance up the curved walls where the command switches has been forcefully disabled.
It was then that she saw them, and understood. There were three astropaths in the choir of the Validus, and it appeared that, while afloat overhead, with great care they had removed their outer robes and fashioned them into nooses, fixing one end to the upper ranges of the hollow chamber and the others about their necks. Then, one of them must have destroyed the controls and allowed the pull of gravity to reclaim their bodies, and snap their necks.
The corpses of the dead psykers swayed slightly in the flow of new air that had followed Leilani up the access tunnel. In the low light, she could not make out any features upon the three; their faces were puffy, blood-streaked orbs, turned to ribbons of wet meat where they had clawed at themselves in some sort of frenzy.
WHEN SISTER LEILANI returned to the bridge platform, Kendel read what the young woman had seen in the astropath chamber from the paleness of her face.
~All targets self-terminated.~ The novice-sister gave her report in BattleMark without thinking, but Kendel chose not to correct her.
The sight had shaken the girl. Mollitas was far stronger than she gave herself credit for – if she had not been, the Oblivion Knight would never have chosen her as her adjutant – but she was reluctant to test her own limits and, until she did, the Oath of Tranquillity, the mark of the Aquila and true Sisterhood would be beyond her reach.
~Orders?~ Sister Thessaly stood before her commander, toying with her weapon.
The Oblivion Knight hesitated for a moment, then nodded to the senior of the Sister-Vigilators. ~Split squads,~ she signed.
~Vigilators, aft approach.~ Kendel touched her chest. ~This unit, forwards. Descend and converge.~ She brought her hands together and clasped them. In one context the symbol could mean alliance, in another collision, or even amalgam. In this, it indicated a target to be located and isolated. It was not necessary for her to outline their objective; the last words of the shipmaster had made that certain.
She switched speech. ~We will find our sisters,~ she told them. ~This is our order and our obligation.~ Nortor made the sign of the Aquila.
‘In the Emperor’s name,’ whispered Mollitas.
THEY EMERGED INTO an icy cavern, boots crunching on rimes of hoarfrost and snow, the access channel to the dungeon decks carpeted with a blanket of oily grey slush. It was a peculiar sight to see inside the metal halls of a starship, more suited to a winter’s day upon some distant colony world. Kendel’s breath emerged from her mouth in trails of white and she threw a questioning look to the novice.
They were deep inside the Validus now, nowhere near the exterior hull where the leeching cold of space could reach them. The Knight raised a hand to her armoured collar to toggle a vox control, intending to signal the Vigilators. Were they seeing the same thing? Was this yet another of the strange spot-effects that were scattered throughout the interior of the derelict Black Ship?
But a motion from Nortor made her hesitate. The other Sister nodded towards tall columns of dirty ice clustering in one corner. There was movement behind them and breath, white in the air.
‘Who is there?’ The novice-sister gave voice to the question. ‘Show yourself.’
Kendel felt a weak, familiar pressure at the back of her skull. It was like the sense of heaviness in the sky before a storm, or the very faintest of echoes. She was drawing her eagle-head sword when a figure suddenly bolted from between the ice pillars, half-running, half-skidding towards them.
A man in a frost-caked overall came at her, an iron manacle and length of broken chain clattering about one ankle. She saw a leering grin and eyes wide, showing too much white. Haloes of vapour formed around his hands and she felt the already-low temperature drop still further. He was conjuring snow out of the air, grabbing it and moulding it into blades of ice.
Kendel knew the kind well: a cryokene. She held up a hand to halt Nortor from placing a bolt shell through his breastbone as a matter of course, and let the psyker come on towards her, his bare feet slapping at the frozen deck plates.
In the man’s eyes she saw the moment, as she had so many times before with her other quarries, when understanding hit him. In mid-run, the psyker pushed into the edge, the faint, ghostly periphery where Kendel’s Pariah gene began to exert its influence upon him. He entered the invisible zone about her where the Sister’s Untouchable nature created a pool of nothingness in the shadow-space of the warp. Some of Amendera’s kindred were stronger in this than others, and in some the great gift of Silence manifested itself in different ways; for the Oblivion Knight it was an unseen sphere that extended beyond her flesh, dampening the power of any psyker with increasing severity the closer th
ey came.
The cryokene stumbled, the ice storm he had been creating from thin air suddenly evaporating in his clawed hands, the ice shattering.
Kendel met his gaze with a warning glare and shook her head in mute censure.
The psyker bounced on the balls of his feet; even an animal would have had the sense to react to such a barrier, to be cowed and back off. But if reason had ever been in this man, it was long gone now. Undeterred, he screamed and threw himself at her, scratching at her eyes.
The Pariah effect, as potent as it was, could only protect against the sorcery of telepathic contact and other witch ploys. Against physical attack, against shot or blade or claw, it was no shield; but for those, the Sisters of Silence had their years of training in the schola bellus of Luna. Almost as an off-hand motion, Kendel creased the cryokene’s scalp with the heavy brass crown on the pommel of her weapon. It connected with a dull crack and he went back to the deck on his haunches, sliding on the thin ice.
‘Can you not see what we are?’ called Sister Leilani. ‘In our silence, you cannot harm us.’
‘You cannot hear!’ he shouted, his voice a sudden, atonal bark of sound. ‘If I cannot hear, you must not!’ He scrambled back to his feet, and again he threw himself towards Kendel. ‘You must not hear!’
He was insane, that was not in doubt. Perhaps, whatever release of energy had killed the minds of the crew serfs and servitors had only scrambled the wits of this one, and in the disorder that followed he had found his escape from the Black Ship’s cells. Not that it mattered. There would be nothing to glean from this witch.
The Oblivion Knight stepped into his attack, with her hand-and-a-half sword still held in a reversed grip. Turning, she brought the blade up to meet the cryokene’s throat and took him there, decapitating his body with a lean stroke that let the victim’s momentum do the work for her. Crimson fluid gouted briefly into the air, spattering across the grubby snow. Specks of blood dotted Kendel’s golden cuirass, but the arterial spray was sporadic and quickly stilled.
She stepped over the corpse and walked on through the ice and snow as the last gushes of red pooled on the cold deck, a thin wisp of steam rising from the length of her sword blade.
~What did he mean?~ Sister Thessaly matched her pace, signing carefully. ~He spoke of hearing something. Perhaps there is a connection with the last words of communication from this ship?~
Kendel held the tips of two fingers to her chin, and Nortor nodded in slow agreement.
‘Give voice,’ murmured Sister Leilani. ‘But to what?’
THE FURTHER THEY progressed, the stronger the sense became of a new, strange denseness in the atmosphere, a thickening of the air that brought with it a greasy, metallic tang that Leilani could not clear from her throat, no matter how many times she sipped water from the dispenser nozzle in her portcullis-shaped gorget. She knew that the Oblivion Knight and the Null Maiden sensed it as well; their moods became wary and sullen as they passed through the outer sections of the holding areas, the cells where the less dangerous denizens of the dungeon decks were typically held. The novice chanced a look in through the locked doors of cells she chose at random; inside each there were odd, wet pastes of matter that might have been bodies, if flesh were wax and pressed to a flame. The air was unnaturally still, cloying to the point that it took on the properties of a membrane. Leilani felt the ghost-touch of it on her bare face, like the gossamer caress of spider webs.
Ahead, ever at the lead, Thessaly Nortor’s boot scraped to a halt and the novice froze, ready for the next maddened psyker or freakish phenomenon to rear its ugly head. Instead, the Null Maiden turned towards the other two women and made the sign for Sister.
They came across her in the middle of the chamber; she sat cross-legged on the dark iron deck plates, her head bowed in concentration and her sword drawn, both hands clasped around the slim hilt. Leilani was aware of a peculiar calm that seemed to radiate from the woman’s body, an absence of emotion or energy. A silence, for want of a better word.
Her mouth was moving but no sound emerged; still, the novice had only to read a word or two and she knew what litany was being unspoken. Without realising it, Leilani said the words aloud. ‘We are Seekers and we shall find our Prey. We are Warriors and woe to those we Oppose…’ She trailed off, her cheeks colouring.
A frown formed on Sister Amendera’s face and Leilani looked again at the distaff Sister. The other woman had a top-knot of rust-red hair that hung loosely, lank and sweat-soaked, over her bald skull. There was a line of livid pink puckering down the left side of the Sister’s face and neck from her cheekbone, pointing like an arrow towards the lightning-bolt symbols etched on her shoulder plates.
She bore the same rank as Kendel, and it was with that realisation that Leilani recognised the woman.
With a dry gasp, Sister Emrilia Herkaaze of the White Talons cadre opened her eyes, her battle meditation broken, and looked up at her. The woman’s left eye, framed by the scarring, was an intricate augmentation of blue glass and golden clockwork. She gave Leilani a cold, evaluating once-over.
Herkaaze ignored the offer of Nortor’s open hand and got to her feet, shrugging off stiffness. The Oblivion Knight turned her glare towards Kendel; the lower half of the woman’s face was concealed behind a half-mask resembling barred gates, but the novice could tell her mouth was twisting in a sneer.
~I knew that someone would come,~ signed the other Knight, ~but I never would have expected it to be you.~
Kendel’s expression cooled. ~The mission fell to us. The Storm Daggers go where they are sent.~
The tension between the two Knights was strong, and Leilani could not help but think back to the rumours she had heard about Kendel and Herkaaze’s thorny rivalry. One story, told to her by another of the novices, said that the women had once fought with a fire-witch on Sheol Trinus; Herkaaze, unwilling to fall back before a powerful enemy and regroup, had been struck by burning debris and later turned the blame to Kendel for refusing to support her. Leilani had not believed the tale at the time, but now looking at Sister Emrilia’s old wounds, she wondered if there might have been some truth in it.
Herkaaze caught her staring and pushed closer to the novice. ~Seen enough, speaker?~ She asked, her augmetic eye glittering. Leilani looked at the deck, cowed.
~I sense witchkind,~ noted Sister Thessaly. ~Close at hand ~
The scarred Knight nodded but did not address the other woman, instead focusing her intent back on her former comrade. ~Are you all there is? You three?~
Sister Amendera shook her head. ~A lance of Sister-Vigilators attend us. I sent them by a secondary path, via the aft decks—~
Herkaaze made a derisive noise in the back of her throat. ~You sent them to their deaths, then.~
At this, Nortor clasped her fist into her palm, tapping out an interrogative tone-message through the signal-generating touchpads on the knuckles of her glove. Leilani heard the short-range signal echo through the vox in her wargear. They waited for a moment for the standard “all-clear” reply from the other team, but there was only the hiss of static. Nortor paled slightly and shook her head.
~Horrors are loose aboard this ship. I lost many Sisters of my own to the witches who ran free in the madness.~ Herkaaze nodded to herself. ~We killed as many as we could.~
Anger flared on Kendel’s face and she grabbed the other Knight’s arm. She did not sign, but her question was clear.
With exaggerated care, Sister Emrilia peeled the other woman’s hand from her grip. ~There was no time to send a full warning. We had to come here, to build the wall. Else all would have been lost.~
‘The wall?’ Herkaaze winced at the sound of her voice, but Leilani ignored it. ‘I do not understand.’
Nortor folded her arms across her armoured breasts, fists to elbows. The sign meant wall but also bastion and enclosure.
‘What happened here?’ asked the novice.
~ Answer her,~ demanded Kendel.
Herkaaze shot
the young woman an acid look, and finally nodded. She began to sign in ThoughtMark, quickly and sharply; the motions were so swift, so animated that to an unschooled observer they would have resembled the training kata of some dance-like martial art.
Sister Emrilia gathered up the threads of events left unwoven by the curious warning detected by Evangelion Station and the logs of the Validus’s shipmaster.
After the Black Ship had hove to and in turn been becalmed in this odd void-within-a-void, from all about the craft probing psychic impulses forced their way into the vessel. At first, some of the crew-serfs claimed to see ghosts stalking the corridors; such sightings were not uncommon on ships where the raw agony of caged telepaths left psychic stains upon the bulkheads, but these were no ordinary wraiths.
These ghosts moved in concert, intent on tasks that seemed more military than otherworldly. And soon, the rioting erupted across the dungeon decks. Many of the psykers killed themselves or died when the pulses of psi-force lashed their cells. Too late, Herkaaze admitted, she and her Sisters had realised that the probing attacks were not random, but targeted at the most powerful psykers aboard the Validus. Each impulse blew open cells and holding cordons – but when granted their sudden freedom the captured witches did not flee. Stranger still, they moved deeper into the dark prison spaces, seeking each other. A troop of Sister-Prosecutors dared to venture in and witness what sorcery the mutants were creating; those women died, but not before passing on reports of what they saw.
In her studies, Leilani had read many of the great texts in the towering stacks of the libraria in the Somnus Citadel, from the earliest volumes of the Psykana Occultis to the Voiceless Judgements of Melaena Verdthand. In these tomes of psychic research and lore, the young sister-in-waiting had learned much of the witch. She believed that faith in sword and bolter and silence were but one half of a sister’s armoury, that knowledge of their quarry carried equal weight. In this, she had read much of the strangest extremes of psykerkind; and so even as Kendel and Nortor watched Herkaaze’s terse report with growing disbelief, the novice found herself nodding, knowing that such freakish things were indeed possible.