by John French
‘Very well,’ said Cyrus. He had expected to find the station wreathed in the fires of battle and shouting for help with its last breath. But looking at it on a viewscreen it was clear that it was far from falling.
Claros station looked a great wheel turning in starlight. Its armour gleamed as if forged from polished bronze. Five wings extended spoke-like from the station’s central hub, each resembling the transept of a cathedral and over two kilometres long. Buttresses and towers tangled the station’s surface, light glinting from the faces of vast statues that gazed out on the void with blank eyes. At its centre a tower extended above the central hub, its domed tip a mass of antennae masts. A thick collar of stone ringed the base of the tower, its surface blistered with shield generators and gargoyles the size of hab blocks. To Cyrus’s eyes it looked formidable.
Beside him Phobos shifted. Freshly attached purity seals hung from his shoulder guards, and he held his crimson helmet in the crook of his arm. Cyrus had not spoken to him since their words in the command chamber.
‘I will prepare an honour guard, if you intend to go aboard,’ said Phobos.
Cyrus could feel the question held in check behind Phobos’s words: if we came here to save this place and it does not need saving, why waste more time?
The memory of the vision he had seen on Kataris slid into Cyrus’s mind: the stink of warp, the wet warmth of his blood. The memory was as fresh and raw as an unhealed wound. He was a haruspex, trained in his Chapter’s tradition as a diviner of meaning in visions and omens. To an oracle there was no such thing as blind chance. The arrival of the signal and his vision were linked. Fate was pulling him to this place, he was sure.
‘Yes,’ Cyrus said. ‘Prepare the battle force to stand in armour. There is more here than meets the eye.’
The docking bay rumbled. Beyond the bay’s blast doors, the hull of the Aethon met the armoured dock of Claros with a sound like the tolling of an iron bell.
Before the doors the White Consuls stood in ranks, their armour bright under the light that filled the docking bay. Cyrus stood at their head, his force sword resting point down, its psy-active core quiet without his will to give it life. Parchments hung from his shoulders and greaves, and white cloth fell to the deck from his torso. In deference to the occasion his helmet hung from his waist so that his pale face looked out uncovered from its collar of crystal nodes.
Phobos and his Terminators stood a step behind Cyrus, and behind them were the Devastators of Valerian alongside the Vanguard and Tactical squads under Galba and Vetranio. All stood below the strength demanded by the Codex. But they were still a battle force of the Adeptus Astartes, an assemblage great enough to break armies.
The blast doors split open with a hiss of pressure. A void-cold wind spilled into the docking bay, stirring the parchments on Cyrus’s armour. Two figures waited in the growing breach at the head of a sea of kneeling figures. One was a man with a hawk-thin face and a wash of gloss black hair pulled back into a braided tail. The burnished gold of his chest armour – worked with laurels and eagle wings – caught the light as he bowed. Beside the man was a tall woman with a wrinkled, withered face, the bald skin of her scalp tattooed with swirls of faded text. A high-collared blue coat covered her thin form, and she held a staff in her right hand. An eagle topped its black shaft, a blue crystal eye clutched in its claws. She looked at Cyrus with an expression of rank dislike, a sneer edging her mouth.
‘Hail in the name of the Emperor.’ The man’s voice trembled in the cold air. Behind the man the kneeling ranks echoed the words.
Cyrus bowed his head briefly; he disliked such moments. To most people of the Imperium the Space Marines were a breed apart: terrifying beings of protection and destruction made at the dawn of history by an Emperor they called a god. Such crawling deference was to be expected, but to Cyrus it ignored the reason for his existence: to protect these people and the realm of which they were a part.
‘Rise,’ he said, stepping forwards and offering the pair a smile. ‘I am Cyrus Aurelius, Epistolary of the White Consuls, and we come in might as we were called.’ The man looked up and Cyrus saw curiosity mingled with anxiety.
‘Rihat, colonel commander of the Helicon Guard.’ There was a tremor of fear in the man’s voice. Rihat gestured to the woman at his side. ‘And this is Hekate, Savant Imma–’
‘This can speak for herself.’ The woman’s voice cut through Rihat’s words like a knife.
She looked straight at Cyrus; there was no fear or awe in her eyes. He could feel the strength of the woman’s mind, the tamed and tethered psychic power held within her.
‘You see the confusion in his eyes, Space Marine?’ she said. ‘The fear he feels at the presence of the Emperor’s angels of death?’
‘My lord, we are honoured by your presence…’ blustered Rihat, his face paling.
Cyrus kept his gaze locked with Hekate’s. He felt the contest in that look, the challenge.
‘Why are you here, Space Marine?’ she asked, tilting her head, and Cyrus knew that she had seen his kind before, had perhaps seen and survived more than most humans could imagine. She was a primaris psyker, a battle psyker and occult savant who might be his equal or superior in power. He wondered at the dislike and anger that radiated from her like an icy cloud.
‘We were summoned, lady,’ said Cyrus calmly. ‘We intercepted a call for aid that indicated that this station was under threat. We came to answer that call.’
Rihat flicked a puzzled look at Hekate who broke Cyrus’s gaze to return it. Rihat shook his head, frowning. ‘My lord, no signal was sent.’
Cyrus flicked the bone cards over one at a time. His eyes took in images while his mind danced with inferences and possibilities. He did not like any of them.
The chamber around him was echoing and bright. Pillars of white marble rose from a floor of pale green stone. Light shone from clusters of glow-globes which hung by chains from the arched roof. Sentences of High Gothic covered every inch of the chamber. Rihat had said that they were the words of lost messages heard by astropaths over the thousands of years the station had existed. The lost words filled many rooms. Some, he had been told, believed that they formed a kind of oracle, that fate could be divined in their broken fragments of meaning. That belief had seemed fitting to Cyrus.
On the brass-topped table, beside the pile of bone cards, the holo-recording of the astropathic message turned and spoke. Cyrus had been listening to it again and again since his arrival. He believed that the signal had come from the station he stood in, but it was also clear that the station had not called for help. He would not leave, though, not yet; there were too many unanswered questions.
Phobos had nodded at the order to remain, but Cyrus had felt the sergeant’s dissent in his dutiful response: why waste more time? Because of a vision and a feeling that I cannot share with you, was the answer that had gone unsaid. The sergeant had withdrawn with Rihat to review the station’s tactical readiness, while Cyrus had asked for a place of solitude. They had brought him to the pillared chamber and there he had stayed, shuffling through his brooding thoughts for several hours.
A blind man reaching into oblivion, that is what I am, he thought.
The bone cards were slivers of polished ivory the length of a human hand. An intricate picture painted with subtle skill in fading colours looked up from one side of each card. Some showed figures from myth, others patterns of lines and numbers. Words in High Gothic wove through each design. In the hands of a psyker sensitive to how the future echoed through the tides of the warp they could reveal hidden truths about what was and what might be. It was an old form of divination, one that had persisted with variations for millennia. The designs of the cards came from a time before the great darkness of the Age of Strife, an age of lost history and forgotten lore. The bone cards that flicked through Cyrus’s armoured fingers had been crafted on Sabatine, the home world of the White Consuls. Cyrus had used this set for over two centuries, and they felt as much
a part of him as the armour that wrapped his body.
He turned another card. The Blind Oracle sat over the Nine Blades: confused ends, paradox and lies.
‘…Fateweaver…’ the voice recording crackled next to him. He lifted his hand to turn the last bone card.
The vision pierced his thoughts like a knife.
The sword in his hand, blood sizzling as it drips down his arm to meet the weapon’s caged fire. The sword twisting in his grip, pinning feathered flesh to the floor. A carrion scream, echoing through him, blotting out the shouts of his brothers around him. Light flowing like water from a face like a flayed bird, flowing into the floor, twisting through metal, changing it, becoming it. Its mouth is opening to say…
‘You are adept at divination, I see,’ said a voice close by. Reality snapped back into place around Cyrus, leaving him with a dull ache behind his eyes. He looked up from the unturned card to the speaker. It was a man, thin and bent by time, the green silk of his robes falling from hunched shoulders. A stole of black and gold thread circled his thin neck and a skull cap of blue velvet topped a wizened and bearded face. He had no eyes but the empty sockets seemed to be watching Cyrus. In his mind Cyrus could feel the ghost touch of the man’s psychic senses play across his skin. The man smiled, showing Cyrus a mouth of crooked teeth.
‘Never been much interested in it myself,’ the man said. He raised a hand and shrugged. ‘I know. Astropaths are supposed to be concerned with such things: the deeper resonances of the universe, insights into eternal mysteries. But, I must admit I find it tedious, and liable to lose me too much sleep.’ Cyrus found that he was smiling. The man shuffled closer, the tip of a silver cane tapping as it took his weight with each step. ‘I am sorry to disturb you, but I thought I should apologise for not greeting you when you arrived.’ The old man dipped his head, making him briefly even more hunched. ‘My name is Colophon; I am the senior astropath of this station.’
‘Epistolary Cyrus Aurelius of the White Consuls,’ said Cyrus, returning the bow without thinking.
Colophon grinned broadly. ‘Hmm, a Librarian of the Adeptus Astartes. No wonder Hekate is so put out. Can’t stand a rival that one.’
Cyrus remembered the primaris psyker’s challenging gaze when they had met at the docking gate. ‘I am sure that she is a worthy servant of the Imperium,’ he replied carefully.
‘You must have Emperor-given patience. I can’t stand her myself.’
Colophon stepped closer, leaning in to where the recording of the signal still turned on the brass table top. The naturalness of Colophon’s movements struck Cyrus. Astropaths often possessed psychic senses that allowed them to see the world through a veil of telepathic resonance. But if it were not for his empty eye sockets, Cyrus would have said that the old man could see perfectly.
Colophon cocked his head to one side, listening. The recording rasped through the last syllables of its cycle and began again.
‘So this is the signal that brought you here, the one that has everyone so puzzled?’
Cyrus nodded. ‘Yes, it is what brought us here. It is distorted but it appeared to be a call for help.’ Colophon did not reply but waited while the message finished.
‘Yes, yes. I see what you mean,’ he said finally. ‘But as Rihat and Hekate told you, no signal has been sent from here. Certainly not one of this nature.’ He gave a chuckle. ‘I should know.’ He turned away from the projection, sucking his teeth. ‘Librarians are versed in the basics of astropathic transmission; had you not considered the possibility of temporal distortion?’
The possibility had occurred to Cyrus. Astropathic messages passed through the warp, and were subject to that realm’s inconsistent flow of time. A message might arrive millennia after it was sent, or be broken into incomprehensible pieces, or even arrive before it was sent. The message might be a plea from a future waiting just beyond the horizon of the present. It was that possibility of an unknown future that had made Cyrus linger.
‘It had occurred to me,’ Cyrus said. ‘Do you think it likely?’
Colophon shrugged. ‘The possibility alarms you?’
Cyrus thought of the ash of the dead world running through his fingers. ‘Yes, particularly given recent events.’
Colophon’s eyebrows rose. ‘Recent events?’
Cyrus frowned. The incursions were only fragments of a sudden flaring of conflict around the Eye of Terror. Never a place of peace, in recent times it had become a place of all out war, a war that the Imperium might lose. Forces from several Chapters were involved, and the front was spreading.
‘The incursion from the Eye,’ he said, ‘the manifestation of the Accursed Eternity. This is a strategic station; word of these things must have passed through here?’
Colophon shook his head. ‘This is a relay station: a hundred of my kind sifting the void for messages, absorbing them and echoing them on far beyond the reach of the original sender. We do not hear the messages that pass through us, any more than a pipe drinks the water that passes through it.’
‘I thought that as senior astropath you might have received word of the war…’
A frown spread wrinkles across Colophon’s face. ‘No, I am simply concerned with the flow of messages, not their content. If anyone knows it will be Hekate. She must have thought it unnecessary to tell me. She is our chief watchdog, our “Savant Immaterium”. An honourable position, though she loathes the fact that a primaris must sit here and look after us less gifted souls.’ He gave a snort. ‘You would never have guessed would you?’
There was a pause and Cyrus was about to speak again when the old man seemed to shake himself of worry. He gave a smile that only looked a little forced and tapped his cane on the floor. ‘Come, let us walk, Cyrus Aurelius of the White Consuls. It will do my bones good and might ease whatever is worrying you.’ He began to walk off, cane tip clicking. Cyrus followed, wondering about echoes and messages from an unknown future.
Colonel Rihat had never seen an angel of death before. He had been a soldier for most of his life – had seen people die: a few pirates during the scouring of the margin worlds, a few deserters – but he had never been in a fight larger than a skirmish.
In his old regiment he had been a platoon officer, though after a few decades he had known that he would never rise any higher. One day the regiment had been shipped to the Cadian Gate. He had been in transit from a garrison duty on a backwater mining world and missed the redeployment. There was nowhere for him to go, so they had sent him to join the Helicon Guard.
The Helicon Guard was a regiment of veterans pulled together from units that had suffered such high casualties that they were no longer viable as a combat force. Recruits took its ochre and red fatigues and bronze battle armour when they joined, casting off their former allegiances. Most were from regiments raised in systems around the Eye: hard people from hives or population sinks on worlds where you could look up and see the Eye glaring back out of the night sky.
Rihat knew that he had no right to the respect of the men and women under him. Command had fallen to him by a technicality: he had been the most senior officer when he joined and had thus been promoted to the role. He was not a hero, he knew that. He did his best, and tried to lean on what experience he did have. But that experience did not include a detailed knowledge of the Adeptus Astartes.
His first reaction was fear. When the blast doors of the station dock opened, he had felt a cold knot tighten in his guts. It was not just the warriors’ size – that they were taller than any of the troopers ranked behind him – it was something about how they moved and looked at you. He remembered as a child seeing one of the ice lions of his home world. The beast had padded out onto the tundra road in front of their vehicle, its movements slow, muscle shifting under its patterned pelt. It had stopped and looked at them. Rihat had looked back into the animal’s yellow eyes. For a second he had known that he was looking into the soul of something utterly indifferent to him, something whose nature was to kill or not as it
chose. Looking into the eyes of the one called Cyrus he had felt an echo of that memory.
His second reaction was curiosity. The one called Phobos had asked to appraise the station, and so Rihat found himself walking beside the angel of death down the station’s passages and colonnades. As they walked he could not help but glance at the Space Marine’s blunt face. There was a compact ferocity to it, a predator cast to the set of the eyes and brow. He wondered what kind of soul moved behind that face.
‘Something worrying you, colonel?’ said Phobos, his voice a stony growl.
‘No, my lord,’ said Rihat, trying carefully to hide his unease.
The Space Marine grunted. ‘Phobos, colonel. I am no lord, and you are a commander of men, an officer.’ He turned an emotionless gaze on Rihat. ‘My given name will suffice.’
Rihat gave a small nod that Phobos did not seem to notice.
They turned into a wide passage which ran around the inside of the kilometre-wide central hub of the station. Walls of verdigris bronze arched up to a central spine hung with glow-globes clasped in eagle claw fittings. This was the largest and greatest of the central passages. Any part of the station could be reached from its circle.
‘You have not seen a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes before.’
It was a flat statement, Rihat realised. It was difficult to judge what Phobos intended. There was no emotion in his words, at least none that Rihat could sense. He watched as a woman in the robe of a Cipher looked at Phobos, the mnemonics she was muttering fading to nothing as she stared.
‘No, I don’t think many here have.’
‘The primaris psyker, the one called Hekate; she has,’ said Phobos in the same flat growl.
Rihat frowned. Hekate seemed to know a lot more than anyone else around her and was never shy of saying so. How she had talked to the Space Marines in the docking bay had shocked Rihat. It was almost as if she held them in contempt. ‘Perhaps,’ he said, shaking his head at how anyone could face one of these creatures and speak to them as if they were ignorant children. But Hekate had done just that.