by John French
I was right to do this, she thought. I had no choice. He would have destroyed us. My child would have been taken from me. I was right to do this. A blue-robed figure that must be Amon had appeared out of thin air. She watched as Amon’s two attendants pulled Ahriman to his feet. No one had said anything, not Ahriman, not Amon, not any of the silent Space Marines that encircled them all.
I was right to do this. She tried to purge the doubt, but it stuck to her like clotted blood to a hand.
She saw Ahriman slump in the grip of the two Space Marines. The one that must be Amon turned towards the doors to the command bridge.
‘Titan Child,’ he called, and she noticed that his voice was strong and calm, kind even. ‘It is done.’ He paused and turned his head so that he was looking directly into one of her pict-eyes. ‘You are free.’ He turned his gaze away, and something silent passed between him and the Space Marines encircling the chamber. He was looking at Ahriman, she realised. Hanging like a drowned man between the arms of the acolytes. ‘But betrayal should buy no peace.’
Amon’s head turned and he was looking into the pict lens again. His eyes were burning. She tried to shut down the visual feed, but could not. His eyes stared back at her from every pict-eye, blazing brighter and brighter. She felt them bore into her, stripping away layers of machine code. She wanted to scream, to run. She felt her limbs tangle in her cradle of cables. She could not feel the rest of herself: her reactors, engines and weapons were not there. All that remained was her link to the pict feeds, and that she could not break. She felt something burning within her, something liquid and vital boiling.
Carmenta’s body juddered in its cradle. Blood rained down from her, spattering on the floor as the blood cooked in her remaining flesh, as Amon’s eyes turned from her.
+Peace, Titan Child,+ whispered Amon. +Be at peace.+
Amon turned and let the killing thought fade from his mind. His thoughts felt clotted and soiled. But it had been necessary; an act of balance, not malice. The tech-priest had betrayed the trust Ahriman had given her, and any betrayal had a price. One could not choose the limits of one’s beliefs; he had learned that long ago. It was a mercy anyway. He had touched the mind that called itself the Titan Child, felt the aberrations, the lumps of self-mutilation and distortion. He glanced at the encircling Rubricae, felt the broken particles of their thoughts swirl in his mind. They tasted of dust. Yes, better brief pain and then peace than what the ship or its mistress would have become.
He looked to where Zabaia and Siamak stood, holding the collapsed form of Ahriman. With a mental flick he extended his mind and lifted Ahriman from them so that he floated above the floor. With another tendril of thought he lifted Ahriman’s sword. He turned it over, noting the markings and the red iron raptor rising from the golden flames of the crossguard: Tolbek’s sword. So Tolbek was gone. He felt something move in his mind, a dull pulse of something starved and weakened. One more, he thought, and looked at Ahriman. He let the sword drop from his hand.
+There are two of our silent brothers on this ship,+ he sent to Zabaia and Siamak. +I can sense them. Tolbek brought them here, his mark is on them. Follow their scent. Bring them back to us. Then give this ship to the fire.+
Both acolytes bowed their heads and withdrew. He nodded in response and turned away. Behind him the injured and unconscious forms of Kiu and the other two sorcerers lifted into the air on cushions of telekinesis. He muttered a fluid stream of names and commands, and the Rubricae moved to flank him. He would return to the Sycorax by Storm Eagle, leaving one to carry Zabaia and Siamak once they had completed their task.
He walked from the chamber, and behind him the four limp figures floated like puppets dragged by their wires. Beside him the Rubricae matched his step and hissed words from broken memories.
+Soon, my brothers,+ sent Amon. +Soon.+
XVIII
Names
Astraeos felt the enemies’ presence before he saw them. He was moving towards the bridge, Kadin a pace behind him, both running, their boots ringing metal thunder from the deck. Behind them Maroth limped, wheezing and muttering. Then something had touched his mind, a feeling like an insect running over his skin in the dark. He became still. At his side Kadin halted, looking at him, a question held in his green slit eyes.
Astraeos shook his head. He could feel it now, twin minds working seamlessly together, reaching out through the warp like searchlights. He could taste the formation of their thoughts. For a second he had thought it was Ahriman. The twin minds had the shape of Ahriman’s mind, as if the same hand had crafted them, but there were differences, imperfections and shadows of weakness. They were powerful, though. Powerful and unknown.
He slid his mind into a pattern of thought and felt the warp respond, drawing shadows and confusion around them like a tattered cloak. They vanished, sinking into a dark fold in the warp. He glanced at Kadin. His brother’s eyes were glowing in the gloom. He nodded once to Astraeos, as if he had felt and understood what Astraeos had done and why.
‘Yes, brother,’ said Kadin. ‘We will hunt.’
Silvanus had tried to drug himself to sleep. The materials he had found for the task had been crude and, as it turned out, inadequate to his needs. He had slept for a while, but the peace he had wanted had been broken by dreams of beasts of light and fire tumbling through a void of stars. He had woken feeling stomach acid kissing the inside of his mouth. He shivered and gave limited thanks to whatever deity still cared that he had not been sick in his sleep; given his circumstances it would have been consistent with his fortunes.
Lord of humanity, it is freezing. He had been given the void suit to insulate him from the cold, but he was fairly certain that it had not been used for some time, and the last person to wear it had not taken care of it. Curled on a pallet of mouldering fabric he shivered, and brought his hands up to rub his eyes. His hands hit the glass of the suit’s visor. He went back to cursing fate.
It was not that he wanted rest, he just wanted to shut everything out, to make reality into a featureless dream. He had agreed to pilot, of course he had agreed, he had seen enough that death held no temptation. But what would his survival be? What could possibly happen to him now? And there was no going back; he was a renegade now, an ally of servants to the nameless powers of the warp.
But, a voice whispered at the back of his thoughts, did you not already know the Inquisition would never let you live after your service was complete?
He opened his eyes. The grimy glow of the single light set into the small chamber’s ceiling looked back at him with a cracked gaze. The room was small, barely a cell. It nested close to the bridge, some kind of crew quarters from when the ship had had humans as well as servitors as crew. He thought about taking his suit helmet off, and then decided against it. The air in his suit was stale with his breath and odour, but he felt certain it would be better than the smell of his quarters.
The pallet felt unpleasantly soft as he rolled off it and came unsteadily to his feet. His head was pounding. He could still see the images of glowing beasts raking each other with claws as they fell. That was not good. He let his hands drop to his sides, took a deliberately slow breath, and waited to see if the dream images faded. After a minute he could still see them in unfading detail.
‘Oh no,’ he muttered, and began to move towards the sealed hatch. He pulled it open and on the other side did his best to start running in the direction of the bridge. Something had happened, and whether they were heretics or not the others needed to know. There were many indications of events taking place in the warp. Many would be dismissed by mundane humans: bad dreams, minor ailments, coincidence. As a Prime of one of the greatest Navigator houses he had spent much of his life aware of the difference between the mundane and the ominous. As he ran, he really, really hoped he was wrong.
The two sorcerers reached the bronze-covered doors and knew they had found what they had been looking for. It had taken more effort than they had anticipated to trace the
psychic spoor of the two Rubricae. Voices and images had ghosted across their minds as they moved through the ship. A number of times they had thought that they had detected a sentience close by, trailing them through the ship’s corridors. They had reached out but the phantoms had melted under their gaze. The whole ship was rotten, psychic residue clinging to its presence in the warp like tatters of skin on a skull.
They placed their hands simultaneously on the bronze doors. From beyond they could hear the muted murmur of the Rubricae, a psychic sound so low it was barely a whisper. They did not look at each other in acknowledgement. No word or blunt psychic message was necessary for them to understand each other. Zabaia and Siamak were twins of the rarest kind. While other twins might share identical features, they shared identical minds. Their consciousness intertwined, overlapping through a psychic connection so deep that in a sense they had but one mind.
They felt another presence in the chamber beyond as they pushed open the doors. It was no matter, there was nothing left on this ship that could threaten them now that Ahriman had been taken.
The chamber was dark and blackened. They saw both with the augmented sight of their helmets and the second sight of their minds. Ash was thick on the floor. Every surface was scorched black. They could see pillars, their sides crusted with hardened dribbles of molten metal. Black chains hung from the ceiling, their lengths twisted by the heat. The two Rubricae stood facing the doors. They were coal-black with soot. Fire had scoured everything from the chamber but they still remained, unliving, never dying, and standing mute as if waiting. But it was the twisted throne at the other end of the room that drew Zabaia’s and Siamak’s eyes.
A figure sat on the throne. It was a Space Marine, or at least it had been; something about the way it rolled its head to look at them told the twins that the nobility and power of the Adeptus Astartes no longer lived in the figure. It had dragged its feet through the ash to reach the throne from a door that lay to one side of the chamber.
‘If I tell you, will I live?’ said Maroth. His hound-snouted helm tilted as he spoke. The twins did not move as their thoughts lifted Maroth from the throne and pinned him to the air.
+ Helio Isidorus.+
+Mabius Ro.+
The names echoed from the twins’ minds. The Rubricae shivered, soot falling from their joints as they turned, their guns rising.
‘You have been deceived,’ screamed Maroth, as the Rubricae’s fingers tightened on the triggers of their guns. ‘You will die here.’
The Rubricae paused. Siamak stepped away from his brother. Behind the mask of his helm he was smiling.
‘How could that happen?’
‘Like this,’ said Kadin as he stepped from the shadows, his chainsword already roaring.
The bridge was quiet. Very quiet. Silvanus moved forwards slowly. He was used to how ships sounded, to how they vibrated with mechanical life; the Titan Child felt dead. Of course, that was the point: drop all systems to nothing, and just allow the most fundamental systems to sip power while Ahriman did whatever terrifying thing he needed to. But this felt different, like looking at a corpse that had been breathing a second before. He was getting a terrible feeling that he had been right.
Silvanus had noticed the silence as he stepped into the bridge, and started moving with clumsy care. He had entered through a door low in the system pits. On any other ship tech-adepts and Naval officers would have been stalking the crevice-like rows of machines and servitor-crewed consoles. On the Titan Child there was not even a sign that another living soul had walked the deep parts of the bridge in a century. He had crept his way past rows of cold machinery, noting the servitors slumped at their positions in the stab lights from his suit. He had knocked one as he passed and it had slid to the floor, its dead flesh crumbling away from its metal components. He had stared at the wire-filled sockets of the servitor’s skull, and a new and unpleasant question had opened in his mind.
How was this ship even running before? He stared at the long-dead servitor for a cluster of heartbeats then moved on, picking his way over the cables that snaked across the floor, noting the grime covering the glass of display consoles.
He was ascending to the main command platform, on a caged spiral stair, when he heard the dripping. At first he thought it was distortion in his suit’s sound feed. He banged the side of his helmet. Noise scratched his ears, then went quiet. He heard it again, a single drip, soft yet echoing in the utter quiet of the bridge. He could feel his heartbeat rising. Breath fogged the glass of his visor as he climbed slowly up the stairs. He could not help but hear it now, a ragged drip, drip, drip.
The command platform was a long tongue of metal plating extending from the vast blast doors at the rear of the chamber. He had seen similar structures on other ships, but they had been dominated by the captain’s command throne, and the podiums, pulpits and dais of senior command staff. On the Titan Child it was bare.
The sound of dripping felt as if it were all around him now. Slowly he reached up and unfastened his suit helmet. It came away with a low hiss. The cold hit his face and he felt the moisture in his skin start to freeze. His breath fogged in the beam of the suit’s stab lights. The air was thick with the smell of dirt mixed with congealed oil. He listened.
Drip.
He started to move towards the centre of the platform, the cone of the stab lights reaching forwards in front of him.
Drip.
Liquid glistened. A wide pool had spread across the platform. He bent down, and extended a gloved hand to the pool. It came up running red and oil-black.
Drip.
He saw the drop hit the surface of the pool. Ripples spread from the point of impact. He looked up, and the stab lights followed his gaze.
‘Throne of Terra.’
The beam of light hit Astraeos as he ran forwards. It glowed blue with heat. He felt its power burn an instant before it struck, and shunted it aside with a thought.
Focus, calm, Ahriman’s watchwords. Astraeos lashed out with a thought of raw force. Siamak’s mental shield rose almost too late. It was enough for Astraeos to take another stride, and slide his sword free. Siamak drew his own weapon and met Astraeos’s cut. The sound of thunder echoed across the chamber as light flared from the crossed blades.
Two paces from Astraeos, Kadin made a lateral cut. Zabaia pivoted to the side. He was a blade’s width too slow. The chain teeth caught his right arm just below the elbow, and wet shreds of flesh sprayed through the air. Kadin turned the blow’s momentum and sliced from above his head with a shriek of bionics. Zabaia’s left hand flashed out and lightning hit Kadin in the chest.
Kadin laughed as the lightning danced across his armour. The chainsword struck Zabaia’s helm. It cut through the golden disc and horns, and screamed as it chewed into ceramite. Zabaia rammed his weight forwards. Kadin stumbled. Zabaia spoke a single word aloud and became fire. His flesh and armour vanished, receding to a dark silhouette in an inferno.
A smile cracked Kadin’s pale face.
‘Very nice,’ he said and swung his chainsword. The blade’s teeth were already melting as it met the flames. Kadin let go of the grip an instant before the blow would have landed. His right hand vanished into the flames, the mechanical fingers glowing dark red as they closed on the sorcerer’s head. He wrenched sideways, his body pivoting with a scream of pistons. Zabaia spun through the air, the inferno guttering out, blood raining in his wake. The half-crushed helm and head of the sorcerer dropped to the floor from Kadin’s cooling fingers.
Siamak staggered as his twin died. Astraeos came forwards, his sword raised to deliver a kill-stroke. Siamak fell, sending a cloud of ash into the air, panic suddenly ringing loud from his mind. Astraeos was about to cut down when he heard the telepathic commands whispered from Siamak to the two Rubricae. It was a ragged sending, a raw scream full of fury and confusion.
The Rubricae fired. Astraeos raised his hand. The glowing rounds exploded just beyond his fingers. Pink and blue flames bi
llowed across the dome of force. He could feel the flames chewing at the shield, laughing with frustrated fury.
Siamak rose from the floor, dry ash falling from his armour. The two Rubricae stepped forwards, firing again and again. Astraeos felt his mental shield cracking. The flames of the exploding shells chattered as if in anticipation. To his right he could sense Kadin moving, leaping forwards, a war shout forming in his mouth; but slowly, far too slowly. Siamak stepped forwards, his form dusty ash-grey. The sword in his hand was glowing. The Rubricae looked at Astraeos with soot-darkened eyes. He let his shield drop.
+ Helio Isidorus. Mabius Ro.+ Astraeos formed the names in his mind, and sent them in a raw shout of command.
The Rubricae froze; their fingers stilled on the triggers of their guns. Siamak faltered. Astraeos felt his shock. Kadin hit him before he could recover, a furnace-hot fist cracking his faceplate. The sorcerer fell, rolled and started to rise. Astraeos could see a single bright blue eye through the shattered eyepiece of the sorcerer’s helm. Kadin stamped down, and crushed the helmet and the skull beneath.
Silence filled the chamber. Astraeos turned to look at his brother, but Kadin was already turning away to look for the remains of his chainsword. From the throne at the end of the chamber Maroth smiled.
‘I did say you would die here.’
Silvanus stared up. A tangle of cables hung from darkness above. Some were as thick as his arm, others were fine strands of silver, all woven together like a nest of creepers in a jungle canopy. A bare arm stuck out from amongst the cables. It looked as if it had been cooked. Dark droplets of fluid grew on the fingertips. Further up the nest, he could see Carmenta’s crimson mask hanging slackly in the curve of a thick cable. Its eyes looked down at him, blank blind holes in a cracked face. He could see where the cables connected to her skull; the sockets were drooling pus and thick blood.