Now that control was all but gone. Only the last, most vital systems remained in its grasp. Still enough to kill every living being upon the Speranza should it so choose, but its hold was slipping even as Linya watched.
She saw a figure drifting high above the datascape. Arched spine, arms thrown wide and head tilted back. Golden light streamed from his hands, and where it touched Galatea’s parasitic growths and viral threads they melted like frost before the dawn.
He looked down as she flew towards him.
She heard the strain in his voice, saw the light bleeding from his ethereal body.
He looked at her strangely, as though seeing straight through her. He gave a crooked smile that was as melancholy as it was empathic.
Abrehem nodded and turned towards the molten brightness of the Speranza’s bridge. Searingly hot with convergent knowledge, the nexus of the ship through which every fragment of data passed and was rendered known.
For all that Abrehem Locke had managed to disrupt Galatea’s control of the Speranza, the machine-hybrid still controlled the vital systems of the Ark Mechanicus. Telok felt Tarkis Blaylock trying to deny the Renard’s shuttle access to the foremost embarkation deck, but Galatea overruled his every attempt.
‘If you only knew,’ said Telok, watching the enormity of the Speranza fill the shuttle’s viewscreen. ‘You would welcome me aboard personally.’
The shuttle shuddered as it passed through the gravimetric fields surrounding the gargantuan ship. The violence of the transition surprised Telok, but he had never known a ship of such inhuman dimensions.
‘That thing coming up behind us,’ said Emil Nader at the helm. ‘It’ll be torn apart before it gets anywhere near the Speranza.’
Telok laughed, the booming sound filling the command deck of the shuttle.
‘The Breath of the Gods reshapes the cosmos, and you think mere gravity waves will trouble it?’
Nader shrugged. ‘I’m just saying it looks pretty fragile.’
Telok leaned over and placed a clawed hand on the pilot’s shoulder. ‘Indeed it is delicate, incredibly delicate. Even the slightest imbalance in its gyre would tear it apart. But if you were thinking of attempting something reckless, perhaps using this ship as a missile or simply ramming us into the side of the Speranza, know that I would snap your neck the instant I detected even a micron of differential in our course. And then I would allow Galatea a free hand with that atrophied thing you call a brain. I am led to believe you have some familiarity with what it can do in that regard.’
Nader shot a venomous glance at Galatea. The machine-hybrid’s palanquin sat low to the deck, its proxy body twitching with random synaptic impulses. Its brain jars flickered with activity, though one was shattered and trailed a host of dripping wires. The presence of Telok’s excised consciousness within Galatea granted him complete understanding of what was happening within his avatar’s neuromatrix.
‘The Stargazer’s daughter yet frustrates us,’ said Galatea, fully aware of Telok’s scrutiny.
‘It was a mistake to incorporate her,’ agreed Telok. ‘We greatly underestimated her will to resist.’
Galatea’s silver eyes flickered and its right arm spasmed in response. ‘Our body is under attack from within and without. It is most discomfiting.’
‘Once I have full access to the Speranza’s noospheric network and have inloaded the secrets of hexamathics, I will purge the neuromatrix of these rebellious presences.’
‘Purge the others, but leave Linya Tychon to us,’ said Galatea.
‘As you wish,’ said Telok, linking his senses with the exterior surveyors of the Renard’s shuttle.
Ninety kilometres below was the Breath of the Gods, slowly ascending towards a ventral cache vault. Originally designed for Centurio Ordinatus, these were the only spaces large enough to contain the spinning matrix of the machine.
And below the Breath of the Gods came twin geoformer vessels. Their tech-priest crews had pushed their reactors to breaking point attempting to resist the lure of its arcane mechanics before finally accepting that nothing could prevent them from trailing in its wake.
The entrance to the embarkation deck grew ever larger in the viewscreen and Telok increased the pressure on Emil Nader’s neck as they approached the terminal point of the docking manoeuvre.
‘Hold us steady, Mister Nader,’ warned Telok.
‘This is steady. You think it’s easy flying so close to something this big?’ said Nader, checking the avionics panel. ‘Feels like our ascent’s running a tad imbalanced or like we picked up some extra weight.’
Despite Nader’s concern, the shuttle slipped through the shimmering veil of the integrity field without incident. Telok felt the presence of a billion machine-spirits wash over him.
‘Control is not as complete as it ought to be,’ he said, instantly assimilating the flow of data through the unseen body of information within the Ark Mechanicus.
‘Mistress Tychon was resourceful in recruiting an ally within the body of the ship,’ said Galatea. ‘All indications are that he will soon be dead, allowing us to fully establish control of the Speranza once more.’
The shuttle touched down with a booming thud of landing claws, and Telok sighed as the presence of something infinitely greater pressed against the walls of his enhanced consciousness.
‘I feel its great heart beating deep within this body of iron and stone,’ he said. ‘Hidden deep within its matrices of logic and binary, but there for those with the vision to see.’
‘The Speranza,’ said Galatea.
‘Is but one of its names,’ said Telok as the shuttle’s forward ramp lowered. ‘But I will learn them all.’
The fates unspooled around Bielanna. She saw them all, lived them all. The world was cracking, torn asunder by the entropic vengeance of the hrud. She felt the alien host shift, migrating from this fleeting aspect of reality.
The power of the skein surged in her mind.
Time chained by the push and pull of the hrud and the Yngir engine now roared through Bielanna in a tsunami of temporal energies. She was the heart of the tempest, kneeling at the centre of her warriors as power flowed through her. She was a conduit for all the things that might yet be and all that never would.
Bielanna wept as she the felt the presence of the Dark Reaper touch her soul, Kaela Mensha Khaine revelling in his aspect of the Destroyer.
She was that Destroyer. She saw that now, the threads of those around her inextricably bound to her doom. None could escape their fate.
She had killed them all.
She had shrouded them in death.
Striking Scorpions danced angular steps around Bielanna, while the Howling Banshees spun like acrobats. Blades sang and the chorus of mon-keigh gunfire was a harsh staccato backdrop to their elegant symphony of death-dealing.
The crystaliths fought with extruded blades, fast and agile, but their strikes without artistry and pride. They died by the score. Each of her warriors was entwined in an invisible web of fates that fractured and divided in the same instant. Past diminishing, present blooming and future unseen to all but her.
Her hands moved in complex patterns, blindingly swift, guiding her warriors like the conductor of a billion musicians playing the most complex so
ng imaginable. She made Vaynesh step a finger’s breadth to the right, saving him from a thrusting blade of glass. Uriquel adjusted the grip on her sword, giving her the strength to hack the limb from a crystalith. In a hundred ways she moulded the fates of her warriors: a step back here, a quarter-turn there, a leap just a moment earlier.
Each element was insignificant in itself, but combined to form a web of cause that put Bielanna’s perceptions two steps ahead of effect. She had tried to mould the fates of the Space Marines, granting them a measure of her newfound power, but the fates of such warriors were not hers to shape. They would rather die than suffer the touch of one they would normally consider a foe.
Only Roboute Surcouf’s mind was open enough to be guided. The touch of another eldar, a bonesinger named Yrlandriar, made it easier to reach him. With Bielanna’s help, Surcouf’s every shot was fired with pinpoint accuracy.
Her mastery of the fates could not last, she knew that.
For all that she might guide the steps and sword arms of her warriors, limbs of flesh and blood grew tired, skills once razor-sharp would dull.
And then death would come.
A shadow rose up to envelop Bielanna, shockingly sudden and suffocatingly intense in its darkness. Like a veil of black velvet had been drawn across her sight, she saw the skein blacken as the terminus of every thread came into view, unravelling towards extinction with horrifying speed.
The end of all things.
An impossible boundary in what should be infinite space.
Bielanna gasped, her chest constricting at the sight.
This was the doom she had seen ensconced within the Speranza. Space and time were coming undone, ripping apart like the solar sails of a wounded wraithship.
Doom had come to this world, but that was the least of the danger. The rift beginning here was pulling wider with every passing second, drawing every thread within the skein to it. Like a weaver’s shuttle reversing through the warp and weft of a loom, the future was unravelling to its omega point.
Exnihlio was becoming the temporal equivalent of a black hole, a howling abyss in which no time would ever exist again. Its effects were yet confined to the deeps of the planet, but Bielanna felt the catastrophic geomantic damage the hrud had wreaked racing to the surface.
The physical death of Exnihlio was nothing, but the temporal shock waves would spread into the glacial void of space, reaching into the galaxy of Bielanna’s kin.
It would be a slow death for the galaxy, as all time was devoured by the rift torn by the Yngir’s device. But that it would end all things for evermore was certain.
Unless Bielanna could stop it.
She rose smoothly to her feet, ignoring the sinuous war-dance of her people and the brutal, heaving clashes of the Space Marines. Her hands balled into fists and she thrust them out to the side, letting the power of the skein pour from her in an almighty torrent.
A hurricane of roaring, seething psychic fury streamed from Bielanna. The crystaliths closest to her simply vanished, vaporised in the raw fury of the storm. The rest were hurled back as if from a bomb blast. Pellucid blue fire swirled around Bielanna in a cyclonic vortex.
Glass and crystal shattered, killing the crystaliths, but leaving beings of flesh and blood unharmed. Green fire bled from broken bodies that spilled black dust onto the plaza. The swirling tempest of psychic energy swelled around Bielanna to form a howling wall of impenetrable storm fronts.
Stunned silence filled the void that had previously been rich with grunting mon-keigh and laughing, singing eldar.
Tanna of the Black Templars turned to her, his armour buckled and clawed back to bare metal. She sensed his hostility, primitive drugs boosting his aggression levels to psychotic heights.
She pre-empted his inevitable questions with a single imperative.
‘You have to go,’ she said. ‘You have to stop Telok.’
She sensed his confusion, but had no time to explain what she now knew in anything but the most basic concepts.
‘Everything is ending,’ she said. ‘What Telok has set in motion will end everything. Your Emperor, His domain, my kin and all we have fought to preserve. Everything will die. Worse, they will never have existed. All that was and all that might ever come to pass will be wiped away.’
Tanna nodded, as his battle-brothers stood with him.
‘How long will that barrier hold?’ said Anders through gritted teeth. His thread was shorter than all the others.
‘Not long,’ said Bielanna. ‘The skein’s power waxes strong within me, but soon it will wane like a winter’s moon, so I do not have long to do what must be done.’
Archmagos Kotov said, ‘You said Tanna had to go. How can any of us go anywhere?’
Bielanna let her mind drift over the surfaces of every one of the mon-keigh, searching for an emotion strong enough to provide an anchor. The Templars and Cadians were useless, adrift and far from all they knew. Kotov’s mind was too stunted in its logical functionality, its emotional centres long since closed off.
But Surcouf…
She felt his love for his crew and his ship, and wasn’t love the strongest emotion of all? It had healed wounds, ended wars and seen bitter enemies brought together as brothers. It had also brought empires to ruin and seen the greatest minds humbled.
Nothing was more powerful than love, and Surcouf was blessed with an abundance.
Bielanna said, ‘Your talisman. Do you still have it?’
Surcouf looked confused, then reached inside the breast pocket of his coat and withdrew his astrogation compass.
‘This? Is this what you mean?’
Bielanna saw the confluence of fates bound to the device, the slender thread that set the path the mon-keigh’s life had taken. He sensed its importance, but not on any conscious level.
‘Yes, hold it out to me,’ said Bielanna.
‘Why?’
‘Because I need a focus,’ she said, and her eyes misted with sadness. ‘And because I need someone to remember me.’
Though he was puzzled at her words, he nevertheless did as she asked. Bielanna cupped her porcelain white hands around his, feeling his deep connection to those he had left behind. He would die for them, and they for him. The needle on the compass danced and spun, unfixed and wandering. Their minds met and she lived the entirety of his life in a heartbeat.
‘Look into my eyes and picture those dearest to you,’ she said.
No sooner had he done so than the needle stopped moving.
Bielanna released Surcouf’s hands, holding on to the connection between them, picturing what he saw. A functional room with a wooden desk. Pictures on the wall, scriptural commendations and a holographic cameo of a woman.
Such was the strength of Surcouf’s emotions and the surging power within her, that it was the simplest matter to open a path through the webway. A flaring oval of orange, arched and spilling gold light onto the plaza, opened behind her.
‘That will take you back to your ship,’ said Bielanna. ‘Go now and stop Telok. Do whatever needs to be done, but he must not return to your Imperium.’
Kotov nodded and gestured to his skitarii.
They stepped through the gate and vanished.
‘You make it sound like you’re not leaving,’ said Surcouf.
‘I am not,’ said Bielanna. ‘It may be possible to heal what Telok has done, but to do that I must be here at the heart of it all, the site of the wound.’
Surcouf looked out towards the barrier. The tempests were already dying, and the army of crystaliths pressed against it in overwhelming numbers.
‘You’ll die.’
‘The future I was to share with my daughters is lost,’ said Bielanna. ‘There is nothing left for me. Death will be welcome.’
‘I wish–’
‘Say nothing,’ said Bielanna, harsher than she intended. ‘No human words can offer me comfort.’
Surcouf nodded and turned away, helping Magos Pavelka to her feet. Giving Bielanna a l
ast look of profound gratitude, the two of them went through the gate together.
Tanna watched Surcouf and Pavelka vanish and felt the weight he had carried since Dantium Gate lift from his shoulders. Cut off from their Chapter and without the guidance of Kul Gilad, he and his warriors had been lost. Strange that it had taken the words of an eldar witch to show him just how lost.
On any other day he would have gone to the Reclusiam and submitted himself to pain-shriving for such thoughts.
‘Can you really undo what Telok has done here?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps, but I will need time,’ she answered, removing her helm and holding it in the crook of her arm. ‘And I will need the strength of my people to do it.’
‘The crystaliths will kill you long before then.’
‘They will,’ agreed Bielanna.
Tanna glanced towards the diminishing barrier.
‘Then the Black Templars will give you that time.’
‘Tanna?’ said Anders. ‘You’re staying?’
‘If she can do what she claims, then I have no choice,’ said Tanna. ‘Here is where I can serve the Emperor best.’
Anders sighed. ‘And here was me thinking that all of us might actually get back to the Imperium.’
‘It was an honour to fight alongside you, Ven Anders.’
The colonel held up a hand.
‘Cadians don’t do last words, valedictions or brotherly farewells in the face of certain death,’ he said. ‘We just fight, and I have a regiment on the Speranza that needs me.’
Tanna nodded and returned Anders’s salute with a fist across his breastplate. The Cadian colonel led his men through the portal as the eldar gathered around their farseer and began unbuckling their armour. Smooth plates dropped to the ground and as they removed their battle helms, it seemed their angular, alien faces softened, like dreamers awakening from a daylight reverie. They each handed Bielanna what looked like a polished gemstone and sat cross-legged around her before closing their eyes, as though entering a meditative trance.
The storm front keeping the crystaliths at bay began to diminish almost immediately. Glassy blades cut through it and their inexorable strength began slowly pushing their angular bodies through.
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