by Dan Abnett
“Sir.”
“Come in, Gaunt. A hot drink?”
“Thank you, no, sir.”
Kaldenbach, who had started to move at Lugo’s offer, continued anyway even when it was refused, and helped himself to a cup from a silver vacuum-jug that stood on a dresser against the wall.
“I apologise for the early call,” Lugo said, almost cordially. “I wish to speak with you about the Beati.”
“About the Beati…”
“About what we should do.”
“In what respect, sir?”
Lugo cleared his throat delicately and took another sip. “I have so far made myself and my resources available to the Beati. To, shall I say, the whim of the Beati. Her sanctified mind perceives the cosmos in a way ours do not, so I trust her judgment, even if it might seem… wayward.”
Gaunt smiled slightly.
“At her urgings, we decamped here to this… place of insignificance. I suggested that her person might be of greater use alongside the Warmaster at the front, but no. She was very polite, as you might expect, but she refused the idea. Herodor was what she insisted on, and to Herodor I escorted her.”
“We have spoken of this before, sir,” said Gaunt. “You hoped to enlist my aid in convincing her to change her mind. Indeed, you applied pressure on my commissar to get me to do just that.”
Lugo shrugged as if this was trifling. “We are past such shadow play now, Gaunt. The Bead must go to Morlond. She must quit this place and go directly to Morlond. I’m not asking for your help. I’m ordering that you give it.”
“I see,” said Gaunt.
“Come, come,” said Lugo, smiling. “We’re all friends here, Ibram. Tell me your thoughts.”
“You want to know what I think?” Gaunt asked.
“The lord general was quite clear,” said Kaldenbach sharply.
Gaunt glanced at him, and Kaldenbach looked down. “Very well,” said Gaunt. “I think you knew the truth all along. From the moment on Hagia when Sanian first became known to you. You were completely aware that she was a fake… a troubled, delusional girl who believed she was the incarnation of Sabbat and played the part reasonably well. You saw the currency in this, and backed her claim, for the good of Imperial morale… and to advance your own interests.”
“You insult the lord general with such slander—” Kaldenbach started. Lugo held up a hand smartly.
“Allow Gaunt to talk or leave the room, colonel.”
“I’m sorry if I’m too honest, sir,” said Gaunt. “You did say the time for shadow play was over.”
Lugo nodded, and gestured for Gaunt to continue.
“You saw the best way to control her was to let her have her way for a while Let her make decisions, grow into the role with confidence A pilgrimage here… well, that sounds like the sort of inexplicable but lofty thing a reincarnated saint would do. To cleanse herself before the coming war. You’d indulge her for a few months, working on her all the while, and then make the journey to the front seem like her own idea. You’d join the Warmaster, no doubt inspiring his forces to a conclusive victory, and your eminence would be assured. What were you hoping for? A sector governorship? Host command? Higher than that?”
Lugo retained his smile, but there was a glaze of bitter ice in it. Gaunt knew he had hit the mark.
“And everything was going so well… apart from a few unpredicted inconveniences like the fact she requested the Tanith as bodyguards. That must have rankled, having me arrive and get in the way. But nothing you couldn’t handle. Your plan was still intact. Until last night.”
“Last night?” echoed Lugo.
“Last night, lord general. When your little pawn did something you weren’t expecting. When Sanian — and don’t ask me to explain this, for it defies rational explanation — when Sanian became the real thing after all. She is the Beati, she is truly everything she believed herself to be, everything you pretended she was. A miraculous being in the strictest sense of the term. And that changed things. You have no idea what to do. You can’t manipulate her any more. She is suddenly beyond your powers of reason and control, beyond your basic understanding. You’re afraid. You’re out of your depth. And your plan is coming apart at the seams.”
Lugo sucked his teeth thoughtfully, then got to his feet, shed his houserobe and started to put on his dress jacket. Kaldenbach started forward like a valet to hold the garment for him.
“A gripping piece of speculation, Ibram,” said the lord general, “and quite convincing in its own way. Thank you for being so open.”
He turned to Gaunt, buttoning up the jacket’s frogging. “Utterly specious, of course. I have known the Saint to be genuine from the very start, and have supported her in that light. Nothing has changed. She has always been a miraculous figure to me. I bless the God-Emperor of mankind for placing me in this role of trust.”
“Just so,” said Kaldenbach.
“Just so indeed,” said Gaunt with a light shrug. “As I said before, it doesn’t matter what I think anyway. The important thing is that you realise I agree with you. Fake or real, the Beati should be with the Warmaster on Morlond. For the good of the Imperium, the Sabbat Worlds, the entire Crusade. I’m not going to fight you over that. I’ll do everything I can to help persuade her. I don’t of course, know if I have any influence over her at all. But I will try.”
Lugo put on his cap, looked Gaunt in the eyes, and then stretched out his hand. Gaunt, surprised, shook it.
“Thank you, Ibram,” Lugo said. “I knew you were a team player.”
“One last thing you should know, sir,” Gaunt added as their hands parted.
“What?”
“I am pretty sure this event we are part of, this incarnation, this manifestation… I’m pretty sure it is more significant than we realise. Space and time and… fate, if you will… are all coming together, and synchronising. Even before Sanian truly manifested as the Beati last night, the ripples of that happening were spreading through this sector and beyond. Signs, portents, auguries. You’ve heard them all, and put them down to hysteria amongst the faithful, I’m sure. But they are more than that. Every psyker in the sector — ours and theirs — must have felt as much. The cosmos is turning for a purpose, lord general, and this is one of those rare occasions when we can hear its machinery whirring and see its handiwork.”
“You speak like a prophet, Gaunt!”
“No prophet me… but still. I knew about Herodor long before I was summoned here. I was told to expect the Saint. My troopers have told me numberless stories from the pilgrim camps of men and women who share that supernatural inkling. Not the fanatics, not the stylites and the flagellants and the mystics who jump at any rumour. You’d be amazed how many normal, regular people there are out there. People who have thrown their lives and homes away to make the journey here because they simply, indelibly knew something.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Gaunt?” Lugo said with a falsely hearty chuckle.
“No, sir. But a healthy sense of fear would not be amiss. We stand in a time of wonder, sir. There is no telling what it might bring, but it will be momentous.”
Gaunt heard voices and footsteps in the hallway outside the room, but ignored them. “Let us hope,” he said directly, “that we are witnessing the end of the Crusade. Victory in the Sabbat Worlds, the archenemy put to fire and flight. With the Beati at Morlond—”
“I will not go to Morlond,” said a voice from behind him.
Gaunt turned. Sabbat stood in the doorway of the chamber, one hand raised to hold back the steel-lace drapes. She was wearing simple, grey combat fatigues and heavy black troop boots. Her skin was deathly pale and her eyes showed signs of upset and reproach.
“Beati,” said Gaunt, bowing his head. Lugo and Kaldenbach did likewise.
“I will not go to Morlond,” she repeated, stepping into the room and letting the steel-lace fall back into place. Through its patterned folds, Gaunt could see the household troopers hovering outside, too sca
red to come in after her.
“There is work to be accomplished here,” she said. “Vital work. That is my purpose. Morlond can wait, or be tamed without me.”
“Lady, we—” Gaunt began.
Sabbat placed a hand gently on his arm and he fell silent, unable to speak.
“Herodor is the key, Ibram. The warp has shown this. I will not leave until this work is done.”
“How…” Lugo began. “How can we serve you, lady?”
“I was looking for Ibram. It’s time They’re coming, and I am afraid. I was looking for my protector. My honour guard.”
“The Tanith?” Gaunt whispered.
“You and the Tanith. I need you now.”
“What do you mean, ‘it’s time’?” Gaunt asked.
She took him by the hand and led him over to the glass doors, which she opened with a press of her fingers. They went through, out onto the roof terrace. Lugo and Kaldenbach followed.
The terrace was a semi-circle of rockcrete jutting like a shelf from the steep roof levels of the Old Hive spire. A glasteel dome shielded them from the arctic atmosphere. The great sprawl of the Civitas Beati spread out below them, far below, a brown maze of angular shadows. The massive shape of the second hive tower rose up nearby, almost to their level, a slabby silhouette against the just rising sun.
Around the edge of the terrace were terracotta planters. The roses and sambluscus planted in them had withered and died into gnarled twigs, untended, but they reminded Gaunt of Lord Chass’ roof garden in the upper Spine of Vervunhive.
Gaunt felt a twinge of fear and melancholy. But for a metal flower from that garden, he would have died on Verghast.
There were no flowers here.
Sabbat pointed up at the sky. It was thin blue, creased by bars of lustrous yellow and furrows of cloud in the east. The last stars were still visible.
“They are coming,” she said again. “They are here. That’s why I will not go to Morlond. I can’t go anywhere now.”
Gaunt stared up at the part of the sky her slender fingers had indicated.
“What do you—”
A flash. For a moment. A little spark high up among the stars. Then another, like impossible lightning, up in space.
“What does she mean?” Lugo hissed to Gaunt, shivering in the unheated air of the high garden.
“Ship to ship fire. The fleet has engaged. A planetary assault has begun.”
“Surely not,” said Kaldenbach. “We would have heard…”
“It’s only just started,” said Gaunt. “Circulate orders, sir. Prepare for ground assault.”
“Oh, premature!” Kaldenbach scoffed. “Fleet Captain Esquine has our interests protected. Four ships of the line… the Omnia Vincit alone could—”
Gaunt ignored him. “Lady?”
“They’re here, Ibram. Now I need you. You will protect me, won’t you? You and your Ghosts? You will protect me until the work is done here?”
“You have my word, lady.”
A junior officer in the uniform of Lugo’s life company hurried onto the terrace behind them, clutching a data-slate.
“Lord general! A signal from the fleet captain, sir. He’s engaged with an incoming hostile battle group, sir and—”
Lugo took the slate from him abruptly. “I know already. Dismissed.” As the junior backed off, bemused, Lugo read the slate data and handed it to Kaldenbach.
“Four archenemy ships. Potent but Esquine should be able to hold them.”
“He won’t.” Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.
Gaunt looked straight at Lugo. “Prepare for ground assault,” he repeated firmly.
Lugo held his gaze for several seconds. Gaunt could almost see his mind working through possibilities, necessities and maybes. Lugo closed his eyes and sighed deeply.
“Do as he says,” he told the life company colonel.
“Lord General, I—”
“Now!” barked Lugo, and Kaldenbach turned and ran.
Now that was interesting.
Shumlen’s vitals-reader had just shown his pulse rate spike the highest it had been in seventeen years. One for the logbook, he thought.
He’d just pulled a turn so tight the G-force had all but crushed him and blinded him for about fifteen seconds. He blinked hard to get his squeezed eyeballs to refocus.
Where the hell was that bat?
He hit the thrusters and spun his bird down into a wide evade. Blitz fire and enemy cannonades fluttered brightly in the darkness outside his canopy. He saw a Lightning far to his left, two bats on its back. Twenty-seven? Was that Liebholtz?
Las-fire chattered and pinked, studding the blackness, brilliant, then gone. The Lightning dogged, banked and came around, but the bats were still on him.
“Twenty-seven, twenty-seven, rake-turn to port,” Shumlen said over his vox as he soared down through the AF fire. A bat he hadn’t even seen, wings hooked, chin-cannon flashing, went by and over him, away. Damage alerts beeped from his instrumentation and he cancelled them out.
His heads-up display swam and shifted, crosshairs drifting as he turned again.
“They’re all over me! All over me!” Liebholtz’s voice squealed over the link.
“Turn one-eight-one and come around hard,” Shumlen said.
His thumb trembled over the fire-stud in the top of his stick.
He was head on. He kicked the burners to full, crossing the Lightning coming the other way. The nearest bat, right on its tail, slammed into his display and the finders locked it up. The crosshairs went bright and hard and started to flash. The lock-tone sounded, a rising shrill.
He depressed his thumb and fell into a roll. He felt the shudder of his cannon pumping, the rhythmic grind of the autoloaders.
The bat flamed out in a bright fireball. Winnowing pieces of debris clattered off his hull and canopy.
Liebholtz wasn’t clear yet. He was trying to climb out of the horizontal vector.
Typical air-boy, Shumlen thought. Liebholtz was a great pilot, truly gifted, but he’d come out of planetary airforce, like so many pilots. He still thought in terms of up and down, right and left.
No such things. Any true void-fighter knew that. And Shumlen was a true void-fighter. Oh yeah, this close to a planet or super-massive ships there was a marginal grav-element to allow for, but that was just part of the game. To void-fight, you had to think in three dimensions at once.
Shumlen flipped his bird up and over. Liebholtz was trying to cut up, but the bat was sticking with him.
Shumlen’s heads-up hunted, washing left and right.
He saw the bat. A Locust-pattern interceptor, painted in tiger stripes. Long nosed, twin-boomed, spiky. Its chin-gun was already spelling out Liebholtz’s doom.
Liebholtz’s inarticulate last words spluttered out of the vox. His bird was consumed in a bright yellow flare.
Shumlen had the bat. The killer. It jinked back and forth, but he kept it in field. God-Emperor, but this jockey was good.
Shumlen tried a shot and missed.
He snatched his thumb off to conserve ammo. Thirty-seven per cent munitions left. One missile. Twenty-two per cent fuel remaining.
The Locust rolled back and over, coming down facing the other way and spiralling.
Neat… but not neat enough. Shumlen powered past him, and began to dive down towards the vast hull landscape of the archenemy battleship as it slid by, taunting the gun batteries.
They didn’t let him down. Neither did the bat.
The batteries started pounding the moment Shumlen went over them, but he was too fast for them to make a kill.
They were still pounding when the bat chased after him, hungry for Shumlen’s bird.
The bat went up in a messy spray of burning gases and hull debris.
Shumlen switched back up, got a lock almost immediately, and killed another bat on the turn with a drumming salvo from his cannon.
A cannon shell from somewhere punched through his port wing and he t
urned hard again, right into the backwash of an AF blitz.
Shumlen slunk away, circling in a deep, open turn. The bat zipped past him and he locked it tight. His cannon shuddered.
It blew out like a flower, the fuselage peeling away into silver shreds. He saw the pilot vaporise as he tried to eject.
A dismal toll rang from his instruments. He looked at his ammo counter and saw the worst.
Count zero. And the fuel load wasn’t much better.
He flipped back. One missile left. Time to make it count.
Sweeping in and out of the bursting patterns of AF, he powered towards the bow of the archenemy battleship. The forward launch decks, open like mouths in the front snout of the beast. A missile there…
Bats passed in front of him, chasing Lightnings. More AF, incandescent. Then a bat with a bird on its tail, spraying rounds.
The bow of the super-massive craft dropped away under him, and Shumlen turned tightly, thrusters burning away the last dregs of his fuel as he came in for the final run of his career.
“Signal from the Omnia Vincit, sir!” Kreff yelled. Captain Wysmark didn’t seem to hear him. The captain was standing by the master console, adjusting settings.
“Sir?”
That buzzing. Kreff could hear it. What the hell was it? It made his ears ache.
“Sir!”
Wysmark glanced up at him. “Kreff?”
“Omnia Vincit is ordering us to join formation. The fleet captain says we should seal internals and blow the Troubadour off us.”
“Does he, indeed?”
Wysmark’s hands danced over the master console.
“Sir?” said Kreff, alarmed. “We should issue an emergency brace warning and clear the gates before we—”
There was an almighty thump. It shook the bridge of the Navarre so hard that Kreff was thrown over. Wysmark remained on his feet.
In a blizzard cloud of fragments, the Navarre had blown locks and torn away from the Troubadour. In the process, it had opened three of its skin-level decks to hard vacuum, but Wysmark had sealed the internal hatches and prevented a total breach.