The ravine went on for kilometre after kilometre, carving through whatever it encountered. Static fizzed and crackled along it, sparking where the shield-gauze hit the hard edges. Red lumens glowed at intervals down in the depths between the colossal tubes, indicating pits below that churned with great pumping houses or climatic stabilisers. No rioters came near that place, perhaps deterred by the many watchtowers, but more likely by the aura of profound dread that emanated from every part of it.
Revus felt it himself, even high above its snaking path. His heart was beating just a little too fast, his palms were just a fraction too sweaty. The structure below was far from inert. The power thundering through it could be sensed, like a sub-audible vibration that jarred, that needled, making teeth grind and fingers press tightly into one another.
All knew where that great trench originated. Far to the west, it gouged and blasted its way through steadily grander constructions, plunging deep underground and boring through cathedral-sized vaults before linking up with the immense psionic receptors lodged deep in the planet’s crust.
They were not travelling to its origin, though. They were headed east, along its coursing route towards its terminus. And now, steadily, kilometre by kilometre, that terminus was gradually appearing on the forward scopes.
Revus looked away from the viewports and switched on a grainy augur-feed from the gunship’s racing prow. It slewed, cycled, and then settled down to show the landscape ahead.
More towers were rising, though these were darker, more esoteric and more aesthetically challenging that those behind them. A great press of spiked spire-clusters soared up in front of the storm-torn horizon, twisting in elaborate ways and interconnected by dizzying lattices of conjoining bridges. At the heart of the mass rose eight massive spikes of dark metal, thrusting higher even than the spires around them, jutting as a single coronet into the skies. And within the heart of that iron crown, more massive than anything else, jet-black, frosted like glass, a hemisphere of such aching perfection that it made the urban sprawl lapping up to its perimeter look like a tide of thrown rubble.
The lightning was drawn to the dome, licking and slithering around it in an unending cascade of attraction. Its smooth face swam with eldritch light, reflecting the lacerating discharge of the firmament.
All on Terra knew what that place was. Most of those in the Imperium with any education knew what that place was. Even more so than the Imperial Palace itself, they knew that they would never go there. No pilgrims made their way to its sanctuaries. No ambassadors attended its dark courts, and no politicians gravitated towards its vaulted assembly chambers. The only qualification for entering that obsidian dome was to be damned already, condemned to burn your soul out in furtherance of humanity’s greatest and most irreplaceable psychic accomplishment.
Revus found he was gripping his own thigh too hard. He could not take his eyes away from the images. No one in the crew bay attempted to speak. They were all doing the same thing, watching it grow.
In the end, when Crowl broke the silence over the internal comm, his words crackling with interference, it felt like some kind of trespass into their private, sanctified thoughts.
‘Behold,’ the inquisitor announced, his transmitted voice a strange mix of both heady anticipation and profound disquiet. ‘The Hollow Mountain.’
Chapter Eighteen
It had been made, like so much else on Terra, so far in the past that its origins were now little more than myth. Some held that the Emperor Himself had laid the first stone. It was almost universally believed that He had designed it, drawing up the plans that would one day connect its central chamber to the mechanisms of the Golden Throne itself.
For many diligent adherents to the Imperial Truth, this posed something of a theological conundrum. All were taught that the Emperor powered and controlled the great Beacon that enabled His warships to ply the void. All were also taught that He did this from His Throne, from where He also governed the lives of His people and engaged in eternal spiritual warfare against the Ruinous Powers of the Outer Dark. However, it was also taught in the orthodox Ministorum schools that the Emperor had only retired to the Throne after defeating the Devil Horus, from where He could be sustained for all time in the service of His people. Did that mean that, at one time, the Beacon had powered itself? Or that the Emperor had been able to direct it while being free of the Throne’s confines? Or did it meant that the Beacon had only come into existence once He had taken His eternal place on the Throne? In which case, how had warp travel been maintained during the legendary days of the Great Crusade, when the Master of Mankind and His Nine Primarchs had walked among mortals?
Entire learned theses had been written on the topic, attempting to prise open the relationship between the Throne and the Mountain, speculating endlessly over which had been raised first, and how they had been linked, and why both were now necessary in order to guide humanity’s vessels through the living hell of the ether. Many of those scholars striking near the truth of its functioning had eventually gone missing, been censured, or even burned as witches. It was most comforting to accept things in their broadest elements – the Astronomican originated with the Emperor and was directed by Him; by such means did He shine a light into the eternal darkness; it would go on forever, just as His reign would go on forever.
The majority of those left engaging in such work therefore knew nothing of the Black Ships that ran their long circuits through the lonely paths of the void. They knew nothing of the ancient harvest of the gifted, who had once been destined to form the vanguard of a new humanity, but were now fated to become something just a little more exalted than psychic firewood. They knew nothing of the months-long voyages in those creaking, heavily warded behemoths. They knew nothing of the null-soulled guardians plucking the strange and the changed from their childhood homes. They knew nothing of the long journeys back home, assailed on all sides by madness within and without, until they came back to the Sol System at last, unmarked and unmonitored, to dock with the stygian orbital facilities rotating silently over Terra’s skies. They knew nothing of the choices made by age-ravaged ancients, selecting those who might survive to prosper under the guidance of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica to become the soul-seers and seekers of dreams that the Imperium relied upon in order to communicate with itself. They did not know that a few select individuals among that harvest might be elevated to the highest echelons of all – the mysterious Librarians of the Space Marines, or the sanctioned psykers of the Astra Militarum and the Inquisition itself – and that of those, many in turn would be selected for service within the Forbidden Fortress.
So it was that the black-liveried landers would descend on prescribed nights, slipping out of orbit and down into the Throneworld’s crowded skies. Once disembarked, the chosen would file through the great arched gates, their heads shaved, their bodies stripped naked and their names taken from them. They would be given new raiment – nightshade robes, controller collars, spinal implants and steel-ringed input nodes at the bases of their skulls. They would be instructed in the lore and the mysteries of their craft, and learn to control the beasts that coiled within their minds.
Many would die during that training. Others would succumb to insanity and be turned over to the tech-priests for servitor-meat. For those who survived, a mind-altering journey of discovery awaited them, one denied to almost all other members of their species. They would learn the true nature of the ether. They would learn of the beings that dwelt within it. They would learn of the few ways that a mortal could employ its powers safely, and the many ways that a mortal could wreak destruction through hubris, malevolence or error. They would write treatises on the philosophy of the empyrean, and compose music reflecting its shifting harmonics. They would be tested, over and over again, for signs of taint, sickness or open-mindedness. They would be drilled in the worship of the Emperor, through whom all their gifts were made perfect. They would come to belie
ve, in time, that annihilation in His service was the highest calling any mortal human could ever hope for. They would dream of it. They would long for it. And, when the call finally came, they already knew the words they would sing, endlessly, rapturously, as their eyelids burned away and their skin began to crisp.
Such was the purpose of the Mountain. No one now living, save He who sat on the Throne, remembered how it had been conceived. The great sphere at its heart had surely been there from the very earliest phase of its life, carved out of the heart of its enclosing peak to house the Chamber of the Astronomican. Perhaps, once, that had been enough. Perhaps the simple geometry of that construction had been all that was needed to angle and reflect the great Beacon into the stars, maintaining the light the Navigators cleaved to amid the worst of warp storms.
It was not enough now. Over the long, dissolute millennia, the first psionic amplifiers had been constructed under Martian direction, initially as a simple means of purifying and augmenting the signal, and then, later, as essential tools for arresting its degradation. More machinery had been bolted on, retrofitted and infiltrated into the earlier, more elegant, designs. Additional psy-conduits were laid down, each one larger than the last, to boost the signal from the distant Imperial Palace. The immense spikes around the original sphere that looked so much like mighty hab-towers were in fact psionic machinery, added to every year by armies of enginseers and psyker-artisans. Their roots extended far below the Fortress’ foundations, and their pinnacles now ascended higher still, until they were colossal fingers of resonant iron, reaching up, claw-like, to scrape the skies.
As the new age of strife had arrived and mankind’s grip on its domains had faltered, this complex too had become bloated, run to fat, half-derelict at its base and semi-understood even by its most senior occupants. The power drain it required passed beyond all reason, such that a minor fluctuation in demand could wipe out the charge-supply for a whole urban subsector. The build-up of psychic power in its major resonators was so enormous that the air hummed and crackled for a hundred miles in every direction, causing sickness and tumours and sending minds into torpor. Whoever its original designers had been, they could surely never have foreseen the throughput of human souls now required to stoke that great psychic furnace. The years of discharge had worn away at the tottering foundations, clogging the Fortress’ creaking arteries, for now more than a hundred souls were burned up every day, only to be replaced within the sphere by the steady shuffle of new blood brought in by the overworked and overextended Black Ships.
So the choir continued. The hymns continued. In defiance of the heavy grind of entropy and the weakness of mortal strength, the Beacon still burned, threading together humanity’s rotting empire of a million worlds.
And now Crowl watched it approach, filling the forward viewers with its obsidian majesty.
He had never travelled even close to it before, but it was not hard to guess that something in the air was different to how it should have been. Something in the harmonic resonance, the subtle thrum of molecules and particles, was wrong. Lightning lanced down across the great dome, jerky static charge snapped between the pinnacles of the iron crown. This was Holy Terra, where all wards were strongest and the walls were manned by demigods clad in the gold of ages, but still the cracks had begun to snake out. Nowhere was immune. Nowhere was insulated.
He remembered how it had been at the other end of the great conduit, where the psychic concentration had been so overpowering that he had wanted to fall on his knees before it. Here, it was different. He could sense the same gathering of unearthly energies, but they were wilder, unrestrained, flapping like a loose sail in the wind. It was as if the moorings had slipped now, the vessel drifting free even as the swell gained in strength under the keel.
‘Any challenge-hails?’ he asked Aneela.
She shook her head, keeping them on a steady course towards the heart of it. The Fortress grew larger and larger, swelling up until it obscured and blanked the skies ahead. It had once been a mountain of rock and snow, rearing up in unparalleled natural majesty. Now it was dark and mangled, just as gigantic, still rooted in its aeons-old tectonic foundations.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I will notify, if any come in,’ Aneela said.
Her voice was tense. Crowl was tense. It felt as if any movement, any breath, might release some snap of static, break some pact, provoke some catastrophic and malevolent presence to devour them all.
They had already passed many watchtowers, shooting low over the landscape of pipes and flare-plumes. They should have been halted there, asked for credentials, even shot at. Instead, there was nothing – an empty hiss on the comm-lines, the curl and whip of lightning arcs across pitch-black adamantium.
‘I’d have preferred some interference,’ Crowl muttered. ‘Something to tell me there are still souls alive in there.’
The gunships angled upward, reaching the metal-clad foothills of the immense construction, moving like tiny specks against the ebon cliff-face. More watchtowers swept by, each larger than the last, each crowned with lascannons and psy-lances and marked with the sombre sigils of the Adeptus Astronomica. Some were dark and silent, their gaunt profiles not even broken by functional marker-lumens. Others crackled with electric discharge, sparking like decorative candles in the surge of the storm’s anger. A few were on fire, though the flames were blue-tinged and wavered strangely.
Below the flyers, close to the line of the enormous trench, the skeleton of a big lander languished amid shattered spurs, its spine smouldering. Enough remained of its corpse to determine that it had been travelling from a Black Ship. Those things were some of the most tightly protected vessels in the entire Imperium, equipped with every failsafe imaginable, and now one lay in pieces, dashed against the cyclopean flanks of its final destination with nothing but silence from the sentinel stations around it.
‘I have coordinates for an intake hangar, close to the main control spires,’ Aneela announced, guiding them further up and further in. Two of the great iron spike-vanes, hazy in the murk, were now on either side of them, and the curve of the inner sphere rose up beyond, glistening as if wet. The surface looked like glass, almost, as if you could somehow see within it if you got close enough.
‘Take it,’ said Crowl. ‘Something is very wrong here.’
They flew tightly, keeping close to the steadily rising artificial terrain. They passed within two enormous piers of black stone, each one surmounted by an outward-facing nova cannon barrel, though neither had any signs of activation. At the terminus of the chasm between the piers was a steep iron-faced surface, gouged and pitted with age. A bank of lumens running along its top was blank and dormant, and none of the many fibre bundles criss-crossing its outer face flickered with light. A carved icon of the Adeptus Astronomica was only barely visible in the low light, glinting weakly from the reflected glare of the distant lightning strikes. At the centre of it all was a horizontal cleft in the metal, over a hundred metres across and more than twenty in height. The entrance was barred, its outer doors down and clamped together like jaws. No guide-lights were operative either above or below it.
Aneela brought the gunship up in front of the barrier. The second one rose up alongside, both facing the closed portal. They hovered there, engines labouring in the buffeting winds.
‘Run standard docking requests,’ Crowl ordered.
Aneela did so. ‘Nothing, lord.’
‘You used the Inquisitiorial seal?’
‘Of course.’
‘Repeat it.’
As she complied, Crowl gazed out at the fortress wall before him. It looked entirely dead, like the façade of some nightmarish sarcophagus. The hard-to-shake sense of dread intensified. If the Beacon had suffered some catastrophic malfunction, surely forces would be on their way to remedy it. Surely someone in the Palace would have reacted by now – the Fortress couldn’t be this inert
in normal times, surely.
And yet, as he remembered the fires in the endless city beyond, the collapse in order, the running battles and the clearing of the skies, it was not impossible to entertain an even more troubling thought.
They know something is wrong, but they cannot do anything about it.
‘No response to interrogation on any channel,’ Aneela finally reported.
‘We don’t have time for this,’ Crowl muttered, opening a link to the other gunship. ‘Break us in.’
Both Spiderwidows withdrew to a safe distance, then opened up with bolter and lascannon. A torrent of hard-rounds crashed into the barrier, hammering into the thick metal. Lasbeams interleaved with the bolt-shell impacts, sizzling into the unyielding adamantium.
For a while, little impression was made. The surface chipped and sparked, but remained intact. Slowly, though, under the relentless barrage, the outer layers began to heat up. A red glow spread, turning steadily to white. The bolt explosions rattled across the external face, blasting divots and eating into the melting layers of protection.
Finally, with an echoing boom, one panel imploded and collapsed in on itself, flying back into the hangar as the bolt-rounds smacked against it.
A gaping chasm opened up on the far side, blacker than any natural night. The shadow seemed to leak out of the wound, dribbling through the jagged hangar-doors like oil.
Vaults of Terra- The Hollow Mountain - Chris Wraight Page 22