Hekate turned to walk away, but Colophon paused and smiled up at Cyrus.
‘Thank you for the ship that you have so helpfully ordered to run before the Inquisition’s fury. It was most kind of you.’ He patted Cyrus’s unmoving armour and limped after Hekate.
On the highest tier of the chamber silent figures in green robes stepped from the shadows. Warp light shone in their blind eyes. There were eighty-one of them: the survivors of the attack on the astropaths. But he understood then that they had not survived. Those that had resisted had died, those who survived had become bound to Fateweaver. Cyrus could hear a low chattering like the cries of birds and the swish of feathers. Frost was forming under their feet with every step they took down the stone tiers.
‘There is one thing you should know before the end, my friend,’ called Colophon from the doorway.
‘I sent no message,’ said Hekate, and both figures vanished from sight.
The astropaths closed on him. Skin flayed from their new forms as the power of the warp reshaped them. Claws extended from hands and feet. Bones snapped and reset in twisted positions. Fur and feathers spread across stretched flesh. Cyrus was at the centre of a circle of snarling creatures.
Cyrus felt the force holding him weaken. Straining with all his will he felt his fingers move on the grip of his sword. His limbs trembled with effort, sweat coating him as he felt muscles shift. Threat runes swarmed his sight.
I have failed, he thinks. This is no longer the future, it is the present. I have failed and here I fall.
III
BOUND
The strike cruisers were the first to fire. Linear accelerators mounted along their spines spoke with one voice. Explosions blossomed off the station’s void shields, splashing against domes of energy that shimmered as they collapsed. On the strike cruisers’ flank the spear shape of the light cruiser turned on its axis, presenting a flank of macro batteries to the station. Bolts of plasma and explosive shells the size of battle tanks streaked across the void.
On board the smaller destroyers officers waited until the station’s shield envelope was on the edge of failing. As the blasts rippled over the last layers of shielding they launched torpedoes. Each carried a melta warhead. They were not intended to destroy but to cripple and burn. For the final killing blow they had other more exotic weapons to unleash.
The Sixth Hammer remained silent, like a king of old watching his young knights take the first blood. From his brass throne Inquisitor Lord Xerxes watched as the perfectly timed torpedo volley struck the station at the instant the last void shield collapsed. He nodded in brief satisfaction and raised his sceptre, its golden length worked with High Gothic script, its tip a leering daemon face of jade. He had killed many worlds and he preferred the final blows to fall at the simplest of commands.
‘Fire,’ he said, and The Sixth Hammer shook at his word.
Claws raked across Cyrus’s armour. Wild psychic energy lashed at him, slithering from clawed hands searching for weaknesses in his armour. Distorted faces filled his vision biting at him with pointed ivory teeth. He could hear them laughing and babbling in death-dry voices. His arm moved, lifting his storm bolter, dragging upwards as if pulling against tangling webs. Something sharp and serrated found a weak join in his armour. He began to bleed.
The deck quaked under his feet, trembling as if in time with distant thunder. The Inquisition had begun its bombardment.
Anger rolled through him, anger at his own stupidity. He knew he must fail: he had seen it. These were not new moments, they were past memories of visions being lived for the first time. A thing with a withered face was eye to eye with him, its clawed fingers cradling his helmet, razor tips alive with warp light as they reached for his eye pieces.
I will not fall to this fate! He bellowed the thought and the fallen astropaths fell back from him. He seized the anger that boiled through his mind and ripped free of the force that held him. Power flowed from him, radiating outwards as lightning spilled from his sword’s edge. His storm bolter spat, pumping explosive rounds through the twisted figures.
The sword was hot in his hand, the fury at its core bright with his rage. He cut into bodies with the death lament on his lips.
The station was dying. Rihat knew it. Blood red emergency light suffused the trembling docking corridor, and he could hear the low hiss of atmosphere bleeding into the void through cracks. The doors of the Aethon’s docking bay remained open as the dwindling stream of people swarmed through them. They had got as many as they could, but there were many more that they had left: hundreds trapped in parts of the station that could not be reached, pockets of Guardsmen surrounded and dying to the creatures that swarmed into the station even as it was torn apart. He had spoken to many of them over the vox, listening to their curses and cries over the spilling static. If he survived he knew he would hear those voices again for years to come, ghost voices cursing him from his dreams.
‘We must close the dock, colonel,’ called one of the last two White Consuls from just beyond the toothed blast doors. ‘The station is coming under sustained bombardment. It will begin to break apart soon. If we are to outrun its death we must break dock.’
Rihat shook his head. ‘Not yet. There are more who may reach us. Your Librarian ordered me to save all I could. I will honour that order.’
The Space Marine paused for a moment then gave a curt nod.
Rihat looked back to the people passing him. Grey-robed menials hurried beside purple-mantled prefects. Bloodied and pale-faced Guardsmen, some still cradling their weapons, jostled beside tech-adepts and slab-muscled ratings.
‘Colonel, we must break dock now.’ The harsh voice made his head snap around. Hurrying towards him were Hekate and Colophon, the bent-backed astropath wheezing as he kept up with the psyker’s long strides. ‘The bombardment will claim the station in moments; you must give the order now.’
Rihat looked from Hekate to Colophon. The old man looked pale, almost shivering with fear.
‘What of Cyrus? He went to find you?’
The old man shook his head. ‘I have not seen him,’ he said.
‘Colonel–’ began Hekate, but he cut her off.
‘We will go at the last possible moment, mistress.’ He gestured at the few people that hurried towards the dock, but kept his eyes locked with the psyker’s stare ‘The last possible moment.’ Hekate glanced at the two Space Marines bracketing the open blast doors, and people still passing through. ‘I suggest you get on board. There is not much time.’
The psyker curled her lip but walked away towards the Aethon, Colophon limping in her wake.
They came for him again, a tide of teeth, and claws. His storm bolter was silent and empty, discarded on the corpse-strewn floor. Lightning arced from his hand, leaping from body to body. Many fell but the rest still came forwards, scrambling over the dead with vulture cries. They reached him, claws scoring through armour, opening its polished innards to shine in the light of their dead eyes. Cyrus could feel strength leaching from him through a dozen wounds. With a grunt of effort he raised his sword above his head, both hands wrapped around the worn grip. A withered creature hissed at him as it lunged forwards. His first cut split it in two. The second cut scythed through another’s stomach and spine.
Something struck him from behind, his shoulder armour splitting as pain stabbed through him. His knee buckled to the ground. He could taste his own blood. Around him he could feel the creatures that had been astropaths laugh at him through the warp.
He could feel the worn joints of the armour gauntlet against his fingers, and the dull pressure of his fingers still gripping his sword. He had expended every weapon he had, used every skill he knew, and still he would fall to the fate he had foreseen. The creatures closed on him. He looked up, pulling himself to his feet. There was one thing, one terrible thing that he had not yet dared to do. It was a monstrous thing, a thing warned against and as difficult to survive as it was to control. Inside his helmet he smile
d grimly to himself. With the last shred of his focused will he reached out and ripped a hole through reality.
The creatures fell back as Cyrus stood. The air around him was an accelerating cyclone of flickering power. He ripped the hole wider, his mind holding the vortex in front of him. It opened wider and wider, spinning with distorting shreds of reality. Twisted bodies vanished into the spinning hole, sucked through it with shrieks of anger and fear. For a second Cyrus held the vortex controlled, felt his mind try and grasp the thing he had birthed into being. He began moving a second before he lost control. The vortex broke from his grip with a shriek like shattering glass. Its black maw ripped wider, spinning everything it touched to nothingness.
Cyrus ran for the doors, feeling his wounded body fill with pain as he moved. Behind him the maw of the vortex grew with a hungering shriek.
The station burned. Red fire ate through armour plating, sucking the oxygen from its innards, twisting the bones of its structure until they cracked and distorted like the broken spine of a dying leviathan. Warp fire mingled with the blaze, daemonic faces rising and falling through the flames.
The circling ships of the execution fleet silenced their guns for an instant, pausing before the last blow fell. A narrow spread of torpedoes spat from the prow of The Sixth Hammer. Black darts running on bright trails, they carried the most esoteric and dangerous of payloads. As they struck the heart of the station the vortex mechanisms created a rippling chain of holes through reality. Black centred spirals opened in an overlapping cyclone that pulled the station into oblivion.
Cyrus ran through corridors filled with smoke and wreckage. His helmet display was pulsing with environmental warning icons that told him of sudden pressure changes, spiking toxicity and fatal oxygen levels. His torn armour was bleeding air from multiple rents. Some of the fibre bundles running through the armour had been severed. He could feel his muscles tearing as they hauled the armour’s dead weight through a limping run.
He turned a corner and saw the armoured doors of the dock still open, the docking bay of the Aethon beyond lit by strobing warning lights. There was a figure slumped over the dock controls, a last soul standing guard over the gates to safety.
Rihat was dying, his skin pale with oxygen debt, but his hand was still clamped over the door controls keeping the doors open to the very last moment. Cyrus paused. Behind him the long passage was beginning to twist and buckle.
‘Colonel,’ he said. The man did not move. ‘Rihat.’ His eyelids flickered and his blue lips mouthed something that Cyrus could not hear. Back down the passage a wide tear opened in the wall, spreading across ceiling and floor, sucking flames and air into the blackness beyond. Cyrus reached down to lift the colonel but the man had stopped moving, his eyes staring without seeing. Cyrus thought of saying something, whispering a last word to the man’s soul. He thought of the station that was being torn apart at that moment, as many dying within it as might have reached the Aethon, and could think of nothing that would give the dead comfort.
Cyrus moved the man’s hand from the dock controls. With a sound of hissing pistons the Aethon’s blast doors began to close. He walked alone between the closing teeth as the ship broke its bond with the station. Behind him the passage came apart with a shriek of rending metal.
The vortices swallowed the last of the station’s carcass. On their edge, the white hull of an Adeptus Astartes battle-barge turned, engines straining to claw against the forces pulling it back into the waiting mouths of the growing vortices.
On his throne Inquisitor Xerxes saw the ship slip from the imploding debris of the station and make for open space, noting the heraldry of the White Consuls. A noble Chapter indeed but one laid low in recent times. The loss of such a ship would be a blow to a brotherhood fading into history. But he could not permit any to outrun a decree of Exterminatus. He nodded to one of the bridge officers and watched as the destroyers and light cruiser accelerated into a looping course that would cut the ship off before it could reach the system’s edge.
The closed doors to the Aethon’s bridge waited in front of him. The carved images of Sabatine glinted in the light of braziers on either side. He paused, tasting the breath that flowed in and out of his lungs.
The daemon would have gone to the bridge to be close to the centre of decisions and authority, to ensure it could influence its own escape. He had hurried through the ship, passing servitors and confused knots of refugees from the station. He had felt tremors run through the ship as its engines fought against the pull of the vortices that had taken the station.
He had stopped in front of the bronze doors. Flickers of half-remembered visions poured through his mind. He knew what would happen, what all the fragmentary glimpses would amount to, the price that would have to be paid.
Slowly he reached up, unlocking his helmet from his armour and tossing it onto the deck. He let out a long breath. The suppressed pain of his wounds was a spreading numbness across his body. He brought his sword up, resting his forehead against the flat of the blade. It was cold against his skin. He thought of the ash of a dead world in his fingers, of his brothers shouting their death lament, of Rihat mouthing unheard last words, of looking up to see a Black Ship in a blue sky.
‘It is what we were made for,’ he muttered to himself and pushed the bronze doors open.
‘Fateweaver.’ He said its name as the doors swung wide. Faces turned to look at him as he strode onto the bridge, his blackened armour grinding with every step. In front of him the command throne of the ship rose at the centre of a long platform. Clusters of servitors sat hunched over system readouts, a few white-robed serfs moving amongst them. Armoured shutters sealed the viewports that lined the walls of the bridge. A spinning holo-display hung in the air before the command throne. Icons moved in the green gridded projection, showing relative positions and trajectories of ships.
Colophon and Hekate stood together next to the empty throne, the two White Consuls beside them. All of them turned as Cyrus walked towards them. Hekate’s face twisted with anger, Colophon’s with shock and surprise. Cyrus opened his mouth to call to his brothers, the order to fire forming on his tongue. He never got to speak it.
With a sound of bursting skin and laughter the figures of Colophon and Hekate exploded. Their flesh came apart, skin and glistening muscle hanging briefly in the air as if pinned out on an invisible dissection table. A rank smell of exposed organs and sweet incense filled the bridge, making Cyrus gag. The stretched faces of the old man and the psyker grinned from the elongating and distorting curtain of flesh. The lengths of muscle and skin began to wind together like strands of twine spun into a knotted rope. The flesh changed colour and form. Feathers and claws sprouted and grew. Blue light surrounded the growing shape, weaving through it in bright coils. Wings formed on a hunched back. Skin hung loose over long limbs tipped with bird-like claws. Two long, feathered necks shook themselves in the spinning light before turning to look down at Cyrus. Mismatched eyes stared from above hooked beaks. The daemon laughed with both heads, the sound like the cries of a murder of crows.
Cyrus’s two brothers brought their bolt pistols up and fired. A rippling shimmer formed around the shells. They turned in their trajectory and began to orbit the daemon like fireflies. Around them the bridge fell to madness. Servitors ripped themselves from their housings, collapsing onto the floor in pools of oil. Serfs and officers doubled over, vomiting yellow bile onto the deck. With a flick of its hand the daemon sent the bolt shells spiralling away to explode amongst the crew. It raised a clawed limb, iridescent fire sheathing its talons as it pointed at Cyrus. The beaked mouths cracked open to speak.
Cyrus charged, his sword raised above his right shoulder. His muscles tore as they drove his armoured form forwards. He felt a calm settle over him; he could see what would happen, his vision of the future riding just ahead of the present. The moment expanded, dragging through instants. It was his purpose to be there, to make the choice that he could sense waiting for him
just beyond the horizon of the present. All was happening as it always was going to, as it would always have to.
The sword sheared through the daemon’s sheath of energy and bit into feathered flesh. There was a burst of multihued light. The daemon lurched back, screeching in pain, half collapsing to the deck. Cyrus brought his sword up, spinning its long hilt through his hands, and rammed its point down through the daemon’s torso, skewering it to the deck.
He paused, looking down at the daemon. The two heads laughed. Its body began to break apart, dissolving into luminous vapour. The glowing daemon essence flowed into the deck of the ship, rooting itself in the Aethon, spreading through its bones.
Cyrus let go of the sword hilt. There was nothing he could do about what would happen next, about the fate to which he had condemned the ship and all on board. He had known he could not kill the daemon; not truly. It would always have the power to cling onto existence somehow. But he had broken its psychical form and he knew it would do everything it could not to flee back to the warp. The only way it could now survive was by taking the substance of the ship as its host.
The fabric of the Aethon was changing even as he looked at it, distorting as the daemon coiled through its bones. It would change more in the future, becoming something unrecognisable, something accursed. He knew it; he had seen it.
He looked down at the last of the daemon’s physical body, its twin vulture heads twitching amongst liquefying flesh and feathers.
‘There is something you should know,’ he said as the daemon hissed ‘You said you are blind, that you cannot see the future. You said you see only the past endlessly repeated. But what you see is your future, daemon. You are blind because the past is your future.’ Cyrus smiled at the daemon as it faded into the deck. ‘What I see in the future is what you see in the past. You are blind because of this moment, the moment that the future becomes the past. I am the architect of your fate.’
Architect of Fate Page 37