by Dan Abnett
He looked at Slaughter, and then Daylight, then back to Slaughter.
‘Whoever owns the voice,’ he said quietly, as though someone might overhear, ‘is equipped with a highly superior tech level. They can manipulate, at a fundamental level, gravity and other primary forces of the universe. They can, so it would appear, reposition planetary bodies over interstellar distances. They do this by constructing tunnels – let’s use that word – tunnels through space. Perhaps through the warp itself, as we understand it – not that we really understand it, mind – or through some closely associated stratum of subspace. Perhaps a gravitational sublayer, or even a teleportational vector. I can’t really be sure yet, so let’s simply settle on the term “subspace tunnel”, shall we? Now the Chromes, they’re vermin, you see? Pests? They live in that subspace realm we’re talking about. Like rats live in an attic or a sewer. The subspace realm is an attic of the universe we don’t ever see. A cosmic sewer. And as the owner of the voice moves through that attic… subspace realm… you still with me? As the owner of the voice does that, it drives them ahead of it.’
‘The Chromes are spread indirectly,’ said Daylight, ‘via the transportational rifts constructed by this… unknown xenoform.’
‘Very well put!’ Laurentis exclaimed. ‘Can I write that down? Like rats in an attic that’s on fire, the Chromes are being driven out ahead of the flames, fighting anything that gets in their way. Or like rats in a sewer, where there are big lizards of some sort, and the big lizards are trying to eat them, so they’re afraid and they’re running away from the big lizards and–’
‘I get it,’ said Daylight. ‘Calm yourself, magos.’
He looked over at Slaughter.
‘We very much need to find out what’s coming, captain,’ he said.
Slaughter nodded.
‘It’s not going to be pretty when it arrives,’ said Laurentis, quieter now. ‘It’s an immense threat. The Chromes may be pests, and essentially non-sentient, but they are durable, and resilient and highly numerous, and their entire population – whole nests, whole family communities, millions strong – is being forced to flee for parsecs across the galaxy, through the cellars and chimneys of space.’
He paused.
‘Just like rats.’
Daylight was thinking.
‘Did you say,’ he asked the magos biologis suddenly, ‘that you needed a servitor? What about a tech-adept? Would a tech-adept do?’
Twenty-Six
Ardamantua
‘But his primary socket’s ripped out!’ Laurentis complained.
‘He was hurt during the crash,’ Major Nyman explained patiently. He had opened the faceplate of his atmospheric suit so he could be heard. The major clearly didn’t trust the filthy, matted magos biologis at all. He was wary of his manic, agitated behaviour. ‘He’s been hurt. Stop manhandling him.’
‘Please be calm, major,’ said Daylight. ‘Magos, perhaps you could be a little more gentle with the adept? He is injured and hardly in the best shape.’
‘Yes, yes, of course,’ Laurentis said.
Nyman and two of his Asmodai had brought the tech-adept into the magos biologis’s chamber, and were helping him settle on a seat made of a munition crate beside Laurentis’s repurposed workstation.
The humans had all been fed from some of the rations in the stockade’s supplies. They’d been given purified water too. First Captain Algerin didn’t think much of their survival odds. Humans, in his experience, had about four or five days’ tolerance for the conditions of Ardamantua. Algerin also didn’t seem to think much of Daylight’s interest in the magos biologis’ theories. To Algerin, Laurentis was an eccentric who had been driven half-mad by his prolonged exposure to the environment, and was probably fairly deranged and obsessive in the first place. ‘It’s a miracle he’s survived this long,’ Algerin had remarked, and Daylight wasn’t clear if that meant Algerin was surprised that Laurentis had outlasted the other human survivors, or if he thought it was a miracle he hadn’t silenced the magos long since.
The tech-adept seemed a little calmer for food and water, and also to be out of the open, in a place where the noise bursts were more muffled. Nevertheless, his eyes were still dead and wandering, and his movements jerky. The sudden attention and manic eagerness of the tattered magos made him shrink back, timid and alarmed.
The magos made soothing, cooing noises, and began to examine the ruined primary plug in the back of the tech-adept’s neck. The touch of his fingers on the blood-crusted injury made the adept wince. Laurentis made a tutting sound and looked elsewhere.
‘Secondary plugs,’ he said, with some relief. ‘Here in the sternum, and under the arms. Also the spine. Not as clean and direct as a primary cortex, but it should do the trick. Yes, very good, under the circumstances.’
He looked sidelong at Daylight and whispered, ‘The fellow looks a little ropey, though, sir. A little wobbly.’
‘He’s been injured,’ said Daylight. ‘In the crash. So he might be a limited resource. He’s not strong or mentally robust.’
‘Crash. Right. Yes, I remember you saying that,’ said Laurentis. ‘I’ll just have to use whatever I can.’
He began fiddling with the dirty brass dials and levers of his machinery. Oscilloscopes flashed and pulsed, and small hololithic monitors lit up, displaying angry storms of ambient noise. The relayed echoes of noise bursts and other background sonics, most of them from the upper atmosphere and nearspace, fluttered out of the speakers at low volume.
The tech-adept shivered as a series of long, low, booming noise bursts filled the air outside. He shivered again as Laurentis began to connect jack leads to his implant sockets. His eyes rolled back as the last lead plugged into his spinal augmetic and linked to his damaged cortex.
‘I’ve had the basic parsing program complete for over a week,’ Laurentis explained as he worked. ‘I mean, it was relatively simple. Relatively. The problem was the lack of a decent vocalisation monitor. I basically made the translation, but I couldn’t read it, you see? I couldn’t read it. To read or hear the translation, you need to pass the translated data-stream through the language centres of a live cortex. The language centres sort of do the work for you. They get the signal and interpret it.’
He looked at Daylight as he adjusted some settings on the devices, and then tweaked the fit of the adept’s sternum plug.
‘I thought of using my own language centres,’ he said pleasantly. ‘That would work. Except I don’t have the cranial plug. No cranial plug. There are ways around that, I suppose, but I couldn’t find a knife clean enough.’
The adept suddenly stiffened. His spine went rigid. His head started to twitch.
‘That’s good,’ said Laurentis, adjusting some dials.
‘Is it really?’ asked Nyman doubtfully.
‘Very good,’ Laurentis insisted.
He turned a gain knob, and then gently dialled up a feed source.
The tech-adept began to twitch more violently. His head rocked and jiggled, and his eyes rolled back. His mouth began to move. Saliva flecked his lips as they ground and churned, as though they were trying to form words.
‘Stop it,’ said Nyman.
‘It’s all going very well,’ said Laurentis.
‘I said stop it,’ Nyman warned.
‘Back off or get out, Major Nyman,’ Daylight said.
There was a sound. A soft sound. A tiny blurt of noise. They all looked. It had come from the adept. His chewing, churning mouth, with spittle roping from it, was forming words. He was speaking.
‘What was that?’ asked Nyman.
‘Listen to him!’ Laurentis insisted.
The adept began to make louder noises. He gurgled and choked on the amorphous sound-forms and half-words bubbling out of his voicebox. The sound was coming from his throat, across his palate, as if he was enunciating somet
hing primordial, something from the dark, hindbrain portions of his mind.
It grew louder still, deeper, more brutal. It was an ugly sound, an animal sound, atavistic.
Finally, there were words.
‘Did you hear that?’ Laurentis cried.
‘What did he say?’ asked Nyman.
‘Did you hear that?’ Laurentis repeated, excitedly.
The tech-adept, blind, rigid and drooling, was repeating one phrase, over and over, in a deep, bass voice.
‘I am Slaughter,’ he was saying. ‘I am Slaughter.’
‘Oh, that’s not right,’ said the magos, suddenly disappointed. ‘That’s you.’
He looked at Slaughter.
‘That’s what you say,’ said Laurentis. ‘That’s the thing you say. He’s overheard you and he’s just repeating it. Poor, mindless fool. I said he was no good. Too damaged, you see? Too damaged. Just repeating what he heard. What a pity. I had such high hopes. The whole thing’s a failure.’
Slaughter looked at the tech-adept, who was still in rigour, grunting out the crude phrase.
‘He’s never met me,’ he said. ‘He’s never heard me say that. He’s never met me.’
Twenty-Seven
Ardamantua – orbital
Something was happening to the nearspace shadow around Ardamantua. The gravity storm was intensifying. All the sensors and auspex arrays on the bridge of the Azimuth went into the red scale, and then the vermillion, and then went to white-out. Glass dials cracked and blew out of their brass mounts. Sensor servitors squealed and clutched at their aug-plugged eyes and ears, or wrenched out their cortical jacks in sprays of blood and amniotic fluid. The main strategium flickered and then died in a ribboned flurry of collapsing hololithic composition streams.
Admiral Kiran, who had been closely observing the attempts to steer the wounded Amkulon towards the flank of a recovery tender, leapt out of his high-backed throne. The cosmological event had accelerated so suddenly, so violently. The seething, simmering storm surrounding the target planet had, in the space of twenty or thirty seconds, turned into something else entirely. The cream of his sensory and detection bridge crew were crippled and blinded, and most of his primary range-finding and scanning apparatus was annihilated. He was quite sure that the planet was about to die. From the energetic signature dynamic, as he had briefly glimpsed it before the screens went dead, the gravity anomaly was expanding, spiking. The planet would never survive a trauma like that. Tectonic rending and seismic disruption would husk the world like a ripe crop, and squirt the molten core of Ardamantua into space in a super-cooling jet of matter.
‘Shields! Shields!’ he yelled, though his experienced deck crew were already enabling the Azimuth’s potent forward shields. Kiran hoped that the commanders of his fleet components closest to the nearspace rim would have the wit to initiate emergency evasive manoeuvres and pull back from the planet zone as rapidly as their real space drives would allow.
If the planet died, his fleet would die with it.
‘What’s happening?’ Heth yelled, running onto the bridge in his breeches and undershirt, braces around his hips, shaving cream covering half of his chin. His aides and attendants rushed after him as if they could somehow complete his ablutions while he yelled at Kiran.
Maskar also appeared, emerging from the chart room with data-slates in his hand, a bemused expression on his face.
‘We have a situation,’ Kiran said, trying to pull data up onto his repeater screens. ‘We have a very serious situation. Something is happening to the planet.’
He turned and yelled at the strategium officers.
‘Get that thing re-lit! Get a data-feed up! I don’t care if you have to act as live connectors and hold the power couplers together with your bare hands!’
They rushed to obey him, though there seemed to be little hope of restoring the feed. Sparks and filaments of shredded and burned-out cable showered from the cavernous roof of the Azimuth’s bridge. Several of the gleaming silver consoles had burst into flames and two large monitor plates had cracked with gunshot bangs and exploded. Servitor crews rushed forwards to extinguish the conflagrations and haul the injured crewmen away, burned and peppered with glass chippings.
Kiran’s bridge crew were some of the best in the Imperial Navy. Whatever could be said about Lord High Admiral Lansung, he insisted on the highest degree of schooling for the first-line and primary battlefleet candidates. Working with the tools they had to hand, the sensorium techs managed to reconnect the strategium main display and re-engage it to half-power.
An image blinked into view, fuzzy and indistinct, flaring with distortion and interference.
‘What is it? What are we looking at–’ Heth began.
‘Shut up!’ Kiran said, flapping a hand at him and peering at the display.
‘How dare you speak to the Lord Commander Militant in that–’ Maskar exclaimed.
‘You shut up too!’ Kiran bellowed, his eyes never leaving the strategium display. ‘Look! Look at the damned display!’
In the hololith, the orb of Ardamantua was buckling and shuddering, surrounded by a vast halo of sickly, bright radiance. Overlay schematics told Kiran that two of his vessels closest to the planet had already been overwhelmed and immolated by the outrushing energies ripping from the planetary sphere. He waited, braced, knowing that he was about to see the planet blow apart.
But it did not.
A second planet had appeared beside it instead, smaller, like a conjoined twin, so closely nestled against the larger globe of Ardamantua that it looked like a swollen, cancerous growth extending from the target world.
It was the phantom, the auspex phantom, the so-called imaging artifact.
It was the ghost moon. And it had finally manifested, solid and real.
‘I don’t understand what I’m seeing,’ murmured Lord Commander Militant Heth.
‘I do,’ said Kiran. Alert overlays, bright red, zoomed in on the display to triangulate and identify hundreds of tiny shapes that rushed from the new moon like missiles.
He didn’t need the overlays. He had already seen them.
They were ships. They were warships.
They powered out of the gravity storm of nearspace towards his fleet in attack formation.
‘Gunnery! Gunnery!’ he bellowed. ‘Weapons to bear! Now!’
Twenty-Eight
Ardamantua
A blast of stunning sound and pressure swept across the stockade.
The force shredded parts of the fabricated structure and spilled over many of the stone blocks and boulders that Algerin’s survivors had expertly stacked into protective walls. It was an overpressure burst, the sort of concussion that might have accompanied a multi-megaton detonation on a neighbouring landmass. The wall of the blast travelled through the anguished atmosphere of Ardamantua like a sonic tidal wave, crossing continents, swirling seas, lifting soil, stripping vegetation and levelling forests.
It was accompanied by the longest, loudest noise burst of all, a burst that every living thing on Ardamantua could feel in its guts and in its diaphragm. It shook internal organs, even those encased in the transhumanly reinforced and plate-armoured bodies of the Adeptus Astartes. It made eardrums burst and noses bleed. It burrowed into brains like iron spikes.
In the blisternest chamber, the tech-adept had risen triumphantly to his feet, the jack cables straining at his sockets, his arms outstretched as he howled the words aloud.
‘I am Slaughter! I am Slaughter!’
The magos biologis’ makeshift apparatus was beginning to malfunction. Connections were shorting out and monitor screens were rolling, blanking or dissolving into squares of hissing white noise.
Laurentis and Nyman had fallen, clutching their ears in agony. The ground shook. The walls reverberated and cracked at the huge atmospheric disturbance passing over the stoc
kade. Fragments of the blisternest material, translucent and grey, dropped out of the deforming walls and the curve of the fracturing ceiling. Daylight and Slaughter began to move up the tunnel to the surface to learn the nature of the crisis, but the rushing, concussive force of the wind drove them back.
Then the wind and the noise were gone, abruptly gone, and the vibration began to ease. The tech-adept stopped speaking forever and collapsed, snapping out the last of his plugs with the slack motion of his body.
Daylight and Slaughter rushed to the surface, their steel-cased boots thundering along the xenos-woven flooring.
Threads of vapour hung in a twilight world. The stockade was ruined. The brothers on the surface had been more grievously mauled by the overpressure than those, like Daylight and Slaughter, who had benefited from the comparative shelter of the nest tunnels.
The sky was a sickly, blotchy colour, like bruised flesh. All cloud cover seemed to have disappeared, and the wind had dropped. It was hard to think where all the clouds could have gone to. There was an odd, loud buzzing sound in the air, and a thin, pitiless rain fell straight down, hard and cold.
The moon hung above them, filling the sky. It was vast and black. It seemed so close that it must be resting on the rim of Ardamantua, propped up on the planet’s mountain peaks. That was just an illusion, of course, but no heavenly body could ever be so close to another without some form of technical suspension or energetic holding field far beyond the capabilities of Imperial humanity.
Daylight and Slaughter could see the surface of the moon, gnarled and interwoven, a vast pattern of fused wreckage and interconnected metal plates. It looked like a giant clockwork mechanism, half-rusted, or some intricate toy planet whose brightly painted cover had been removed to expose the inner workings.
Daylight saw the ships, tiny by comparison, that flooded out of the moon’s interior into the sky. They looked like insects swarming in their masses, coming out of their colony mound on the one hot day of the year to take wing and migrate.