by John French
His heart beat once.
He had not done this in a long time. Even when Tolbek had come for him, he had fought from instinct. This, though, this would be different.
He let the sensations of his physical self return fully. His mind searched for imbalance in his body chemistry. He had to have balance. To enter the mind of battle everything needed to be in balance. He was crouched on one knee, he realised: his head bent as if in prayer, his fingertips resting on the floor.
He stood, and opened his eyes.
Debris was still falling around him. He could see torn slivers of metal spinning slowly amongst shreds of burning parchment. The walls had buckled outwards as if hit by a Titan’s fist, and they were glowing with heat. Beside him Astraeos was still straightening, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword. Kadin was a pace further away, standing just as he had been in the hold of the Titan Child. Red light covered them, caught in the moment before it strobed off and blinked back. A fog half filled the roof, venting from ducts in the ceiling. He could sense the toxins in the fog, the potential for death waiting in each particle. At their backs was darkness, in front of them a door of riveted metal. A yellowed skull stared at Ahriman from the centre of a tri-barred ‘I’ worked into the door in black marble. He did not recognise the symbol.
His hearts beat again.
Thoughts, reasoning and logic slotted back into place like cogs in clockwork. This was what it was to be a Magister Templi of the Thousand Sons, this was what the Imperium had never grasped; power was nothing without balance. Reason to balance force, will to balance passion, coldness to balance fury.
Ahriman sensed Astraeos reaching into the warp, drawing power to him like a choking man gulping air. Foolish, rash, unbalanced. The warp submitted to will, but to the balanced mind and body it gave the power to soar. Ahriman waited. He was ready, his mind rooted, its processes running with perfect precision. He expanded his awareness. There were people coming for them; they were running down the corridor on the other side of the door.
Kadin had taken a stride, the pistons of his augmetic legs bunching in place of muscle. The door in front of them remained shut.
Ahriman selected his patterns of thought and formulae, placing them within the blank sheet of his mind like a surgeon arranging razors on a silver tray.
He was ready.
His hearts beat once.
Kadin’s step crashed down. Red light strobed across Ahriman as he flicked out a telepathic command.
+Down.+
Astraeos ducked. Kadin twisted, trying to shrug the command off even as he crashed into the passage wall.
Fire sprang from Ahriman’s eyes. The air roared as it cooked. The white-hot beam struck the door and bored through it like a spear through fat. Liquid metal sprayed out in a molten flower. The hole in the door widened, rippling outwards, glowing brighter and brighter.
Ahriman could feel the presence of minds beyond the door, fourteen still alive, one fading to nothing, ten already gone. His telekinetic blow hit the door and blew the remains out in a cone of molten metal rain. The troopers that had been crouching in the passage beyond vanished as the pressure wave lifted them from their feet and mashed them into the walls. Some further back held their nerve and began to fire. Shots clouded the glowing breach in the door.
Ahriman walked forwards. Cold light followed him, wrapping his body, spiralling around him as if in an invisible wind. The troopers kept firing as he stepped through the breach. Las-bolts and hard rounds flared as they met the cloak of light and began to spin, forming an accelerating column. Ahriman kept walking, the cyclone turning around him sucking up debris from the floor; swelling, turning faster and faster, beginning to glow as the fragments abraded to sand. Lightning crackled across its surface. Ahriman could feel his mind holding every particle as it flew.
He reached the door. A wall of fire rose to meet him. He released the cyclone and it tore forwards.
The storm broke over the troopers and tore them into fragments of bone and tatters of flesh. It swept on, scraping the passage walls to shining metal, and smearing everything with a wet red film. Ahriman walked in its wake, his eyes closed as his mind leapt ahead, running under the skin of the ship, sensing and hunting like a loosed hound.
Iobel pulled herself to her feet. There was blood smeared across the inside of her helmet. She reached up and yanked it off.
‘Emergency protocol–’ protested Malkira as Iobel took a breath. The air of the command chamber stank of burning wiring and overheating machines. Iobel tasted blood on her lips. Her head felt as if something were trying to crack it open. The chronotrap on her chest was whining, its cogs spinning faster than she could see.
‘Shut up,’ she said, and spat onto the floor. Malkira went still. Unable to see her face, Iobel wondered if the old crone had died of shock.
‘We have a secondary grade incursion in progress,’ said Erionas, the monotone of his voice cracking.
‘Primary,’ said Iobel. Somewhere inside her chest something clicked wetly. She coughed and tasted iron and acid on her tongue. She had glimpsed something in the hammerblow moment when the incursion began. It lingered in her perception like a bruise. An impression of the soul that had broken their psychic defences like a hand punching spun sugar. Calm – behind the power, the mind that guided the destruction had been calm. ‘It’s a primary grade incursion.’
‘How can you be sure?’ asked Malkira.
‘Because I am the only psyker on this ship.’ She looked at each of the other inquisitors in turn. Beneath her feet the deck shook in time with distant macro-cannon fire. ‘Because I felt what just happened. It’s him; he knows what we have seen. He has come for us.’
Ahriman’s mind spun through the Lord of Mankind. This was his thought form, the shape of his mind and soul projected into the warp. He was still standing in the dark corridor, but his mind was a ghostly bird in flight. His senses skimmed down tunnels, passing through metal, ramming through warded doors. Images and sensations flicked past his mind: the smell of oil, the clang of feet on plated floors, the blare of alarms. He noted each detail, building a map in his mind. He spread his awareness, thinning it to the barest layer of perception and instinct. Physical substance faded to a whisper-thin impression, minds became candles flickering in a fog of matter. As he soared he felt the crystalline shapes of psychic wards and the empty domes of null fields. He spun past them, squeezing through gaps like water through cracked glass.
There: a mind shaped like no other on the ship. It was twisted, like a tree trained to grow in a particular shape. He could feel the lines of its altered mental architecture: the consciousness of a Navigator.
Ahriman’s mind snapped back into his physical self. The wide junction in front of him was red and slick with meat and chewed fragments of armour. Above them a snowflake formation of cogs whirled and spun in the domed ceiling. There was clockwork everywhere, thousands of devices great and small, slicing through time in billions of ticks, as if terrified of losing an unmeasured moment. The entire ship was built on paranoia, laced with poorly understood defences. It made him want to smile.
Kadin was working his way through a knot of crimson-clad troopers. Astraeos was watching his brother, his glowing force sword bright in his hand, the fresh blue lacquer of his armour already scarred, burned and spattered with a sticky red film. Ahriman could not see his face, but coldness radiated from the Librarian’s mind. He could not interpret what it meant and he had not time to read more deeply. He reached into Astraeos’s mind and showed him the path to the Navigator.
+Go,+ he sent to Astraeos. +Kadin will protect me. Be swift.+
Astraeos nodded and made for a passage that sloped up towards the apex of the ship’s spine. Ahriman watched him go. In his mind he reached back, feeling for the link to the ritual circle inscribed on the deck of the Titan Child’s hold. It was there, waiting at the edge of his consciousness, a thread to lead them back through the dark. He rose into the air, lightning blazing around him as
telekinetic hands cradled him. The gate back through the aether opened like an eye into blackness. It felt like fire, like ice, like the kiss of steel and the taste of dust on desert air.
+Be swift,+ he sent again. + I cannot hold the way back open for long.+
Silvanus came to his feet in a single movement. His heart thudded in his chest. He turned around, his hands raised as if to ward off a blow.
Nothing.
To the side of the chamber his warden pivoted its torso section, looking at him with questioning crystal eyes. Silvanus breathed hard and felt the terror still running through him. There was nothing there. The ocular chamber was as it had been when he had begun his meditation, the sounds of the ship muffled by the thick blue fabric that covered the floor and crept up the walls. It was quiet except for the sound of his ragged breaths.
He shook his head, and rubbed a hand across the fabric covering his third eye. It was aching. He had been lying on the velvet-covered pallet at the chamber’s centre, allowing his mind to slip into the hypnotic awareness required before navigation. He had been visualising, preparing his mind for the perception of the warp. Then something had moved across his mind, blotting out his thoughts like a vast winged shape passing in front of the sun, and he found himself standing, adrenaline shaking through his veins.
He looked around again, each sense straining for some indication that he might have imagined it. His eyes twitched over every detail: the silver shutters closed over the dome above, the gems sewn into every dimple in the upholstered floor, the polished wood covering the door that led to the lift shaft. Everything was as it was, as it should be.
The insistent beat of his heart began to slow. He took a breath, looked back at the warden’s patiently waiting gaze.
‘You did not notice anything?’ The guardian servitor tilted its head then rotated its gaze away. ‘Thought not.’
The sound of rending metal rang through the chamber. Silvanus froze. The sound came again, echoing like the ringing of a broken bell. He stared towards the doors. Had he seen them tremble? On the other side of the chamber the warden unfolded, growing taller as its leg pistons extended. Its armour plates shifted to increase its bulk. It trained its weapons on the lift door and Silvanus could see the pulse of power in their charge coils. There was a smell of ionising air.
‘Retreat. Behind. My. Position,’ said the warden in a dead machine voice. Silvanus realised it was the first time he had heard it speak. He nodded and began to move.
He took one step, and felt the cushioned floor shake beneath him. Silvanus had just time to dive to the ground before the door vanished in a scream of vaporising wood and exploding steel. Dust and smoke flooded the chamber. Silvanus hit the floor, and curled into a ball. He could not hear, everything was a dull roar. The warden fired, beams of energy carving through the smoke.
A shape appeared out of the fog. It was huge, a blunt outline of armour. The warden twisted, fired and fired again before Silvanus could close his eyes. Blue stars of energy flew across his vision, burning into his retinas. The armoured figure raised a hand. The beams of energy hit a wall of golden light, and the room vanished in a sheet of white brilliance. Silvanus caught a glimpse of a blunt-snouted helm and gleaming blue armour before his eyes shut.
A Space Marine. A Librarian. As he opened his eyes to the storm of light and fury he realised that his chances of surviving were minimal.
The warden was firing again, shifting position in a blur of piston-driven limbs. More bolts of energy burned through the fog from its weapons. The Librarian pivoted, his form blurring with speed. The energy beams never hit him, but began to orbit him in neon lines. The warden shifted, armour plates redistributing over its body as its weapons vented heat.
The Librarian halted. The captured bolts of energy flicked out as a trailing whip of starlight. The warden was moving, but not fast enough. The bolts of energy struck its central torso and burned into its core. It stood, twitching for an instant, weapons trying to rise, liquid metal spraying down its chest. Then it fell, with a sound of unwinding gears. The Librarian began to pace forwards.
The warden pushed itself up and leapt forwards. Half dead, it was still fast. It was on the Librarian before he could move, pitching him from his feet. The two fell together. Metal screeched on ceramite. The warden tried to bring a weapon to bear, but the Librarian’s hand clamped around its barrel. Silvanus could see the pistons in the warden’s arm juddering with force. Oil was dribbling to the floor from ruptured hydraulic feeds.
The Librarian’s arm began to bend, and the muzzle of the warden’s weapon began to glow. The Librarian grunted. Arcs of indigo light wormed across his armour, spreading frost in their wake. The warden lifted into the air, its limbs struggling against invisible bonds. There was a storm reek in the air, a scent of electricity and cold iron. The Librarian came to his feet in a single movement and his sword came up with him. Its edge looked like sunlight caught in fractured glass.
The warden’s head twisted around, its machine eyes locking on Silvanus. It began to make a sound that might have been the start of a word. The sword cut it in two.
It hung in the air for a second, its limbs suddenly still, blood and oil pouring to the floor. Then it fell. The oil soaking the fabric-covered floor began to burn. The Librarian walked forwards through the spreading flame.
Oh, God-Emperor, thought Silvanus. He could see scorch marks spreading up the Librarian’s greaves. He had seen Space Marines before, had navigated ships in warfleets accompanying many Chapters. He was not one of the masses who only knew of the Adeptus Astartes through stories. That knowledge was no comfort.
The Librarian stopped, his green eyes fixed on Silvanus. His sword smoked with ghost energy. Gold-etched serpents coiled down its length, and hounds snarled from the crossguard. Silvanus could not take his eyes off the blade. The Librarian gave a low growl, the sound rolling from his speaker-grille like distant thunder. After a second Silvanus realised that the sound was a humourless laugh.
‘You will live, Navigator,’ the Space Marine said as he reached down and pulled Silvanus from the floor.
‘Navigator spire breached,’ Erionas shouted an instant before a servitor echoed his words.
‘We are dead,’ said Iobel, but Erionas was not listening. His shining eyes were twitching as if in a deep dream, reading fast flows of data. ‘He will kill what we know.’
‘It is not him,’ spat Malkira. ‘It cannot be. How can he be here?’
‘The warden is no longer active,’ said Erionas. ‘We must presume the Navigator is lost.’
‘Irrelevant,’ said Malkira. ‘We are running in to Cadia in real space. The loss of the Navigator is not a primary threat.’
‘And if we need to jump to the warp?’ Iobel did not look at the other two inquisitors. Her eyes were moving around the chamber. The Lord of Mankind was still firing on the enemy vessel, still closing for the kill. Gunnery officers and augur servitors called out changes in target aspect and firing pattern. Around them others tried to track the progress of the incursion. That had not proved easy – it was moving with extreme aggression, demolishing opposition and breaking through containment measures. And all the while the chronotraps whirled out of sync, counting down the potential taint of each one of them.
So many uncertain outcomes, she thought. So many possibilities that end with us as just another dead ship drifting on the edge of the Eye. That represented something worse than damnation, or death; it represented failure. Slowly she nodded once to herself, and checked that her power mace was still clamped to her back. She picked up the boltgun from where it lay on the arm of her throne and racked the arming slide. She had watched the making of each of the shells in its clip. Nine thousand verses of detestation covered each casing in lettering finer than a strand of hair. Each round was tipped by Terran smelted silver and filled with the dust produced by the Golden Throne. She began to walk towards the chamber doors.
‘You must not leave. We are in lockdown protocol,’ M
alkira’s voice blurted out behind her.
‘What are you doing?’ called Erionas.
‘I am going to try and kill what has come for us,’ she called without looking back. While I still have hope that it is possible, she thought to herself. She turned to look back at her enthroned and unmoving peers. Her eyes moved to the red-robed figures crouched at the side of each throne. ‘I will take the seraphs,’ she said.
Malkira was shaking her head. Iobel could feel the crone’s anger rising, tickling at the edges of her psychic senses. Erionas remained still, and then nodded once.
‘Jehoel,’ he said. The creature beside his throne unfolded. It moved with a docile slowness, but she could see the impression of muscles bunching under the fabric. It stood still, waiting.
‘Midrash,’ said Iobel, and a second hunched figure stood from beside her empty throne. The lump of its head turned within its cowl to look at her.
Iobel looked back to Malkira. The crone reached up and unfastened her helm. She looked at Iobel with her true eyes, and then tapped the chronotrap on her chest.
‘We are almost out of time. Much longer within the Eye and we cannot return.’
Iobel nodded.
Malkira continued to gaze at her, and then her lips cracked over her silver teeth. ‘Arvenus,’ she said. The figure beside her throne stood.
Iobel turned and walked to the chamber’s sealed door. In her wake the hooded figures followed.
+Hurry.+ Ahriman’s thought broke into Astraeos’s mind with raw urgency. He did not bother to reply but began to run faster. The Navigator hung from his left hand, half conscious, moaning in pain, his legs dragging in his wake. Astraeos kept moving. It did not matter if the Navigator was in pain. All that mattered was that he was alive.
Astraeos still had his sword drawn, its edge lit with a fragment of his will. He could smell battle in his mind, the scent of screams and panic getting stronger with each step. He turned a corner and the light and sound of battle broke over him. Bodies lay in wet red heaps. Chunks of meat lay in black pools which reflected the flash of gunfire. Above it all Ahriman floated. The warp tunnel back to the Titan Child hung beneath Ahriman, a frozen lightning bolt opening wide like a mouth. Beyond the gate’s opening, colours spiralled into an impossible distance. Acid sweat oozed across his skin as he looked at it.