by John French
It was like touching lightning.
He blanked out. When he came to he was kneeling on the lift platform. The motionless shape of Taldak lay before him, fuming oily smoke.
He pulled his helm off and sucked a deep breath of air. It tasted of bitter iron.
‘That was foolish,’ said Sota-Nul to him. She was bent over an open panel on the platform. Prehensile cables snaked from her robes and buried themselves inside the opening. The platform jolted to a halt.
Prophesius was standing three paces away, utterly still, as though he had not moved. The iron-masked astropath raised his wax tablet as Argonis looked at him. A silver-spiked finger flickered across the tablet.
he lives, wrote Prophesius, scraping the words clean as he finished. he dreams in the cradle of sharpness and delight. he will wake, and he will remember nothing.
i will stay.
i will watch him in his dreams.
Argonis nodded. Relief and revulsion washed through him. He reflexively reached for the key to Prophesius’s mask, and found it still there, hanging within the gorget of his armour.
Sota-Nul gave a low hiss, which sounded strangely like pleasure, and doors set into the wall of the shaft opened. Argonis stood. The space beyond was dark, but he could taste charge on the air. The hum of power conduits and machines pressed upon the exposed skin of his face. He slid his gladius free, thumb hovering over the activation stud.
‘You predicted guards,’ he said.
‘Most certainly,’ said Sota-Nul, disconnecting herself from the platform and gliding over to his side. ‘They will be here.’
‘If you are wrong and there are legionaries–’
‘There will not be. This is not their domain. Even Perturabo respects that.’
‘So they will be tech-priests, your kind?’
‘Not my kind. Weaklings, creatures of a lower dominion, fools that happen to follow at the side of our allies. I am of the future, they still are of the past.’
Argonis did not know what she was talking about, and he was certain that he did not want to have that ignorance corrected.
He stepped through the door. The darkness beyond spread out in every direction. He paused as his eyes gathered the scraps of light from the gloom. A narrow walkway extended from where he stood. Beneath it empty space dropped down to a distant floor. Vast shapes rose to either side of the walkway. Sparks flashed occasionally across their surfaces, illuminating patches of metal and tangles of cable. These were the datastacks of the Sightless Warren. In the previous life of the shelter they would have held the data records of troops, supplies and shipping movements of crusade forces that had mustered and shipped out from the planet. The Priests of Mars had laid the core of these great machines in the early decades of the planet’s compliance. They had grown since that time, so that now they spread through the charged gloom like mountains.
Sota-Nul slid past him, hissing with anticipation.
‘Where do–’
‘So new, so untouched,’ said Sota-Nul. ‘Ah, you have dreamed so long, but not known how to dream, my children.’
She shivered, her robes rustling in the charged air.
Argonis followed, feeling the weight of his blade in the cradle of his fingers. Worms of charge squirmed and vanished across his armour. He could hear a deep, throbbing buzz vibrating through the air and walkway. They kept moving.
The tech-priest appeared without warning.
Stepping from the shadow of one of the machine stacks, he must have been standing utterly still. Umbilical cables still linked him to the great machine. He blurted a stream of machine code. Weapons, or fingers, or fingers that were weapons, glinted at the end of his arms. Argonis began to move. Sota-Nul moved faster. She flew forwards. The air shimmered around her, oily slicks of light spiralled in her wake. A halo of silver arms spread from beneath her robes. Argonis saw turning blades and injector spikes beneath her robe. Wet flesh glistened with the rainbow sheen of oil. Eyelids blinked over clusters of crystal eyes inside nests of sinew and clockwork. She had no legs, just a column of tangled cables.
The tech-priest tried to twist aside, lightning building on his fingers. Sota-Nul hissed. The electricity arced from the tech-priest’s hand. Sota-Nul rattled a stream of scratching machine code as she struck. She folded around the tech-priest. Her halo of tentacles punched down, and the tech-priest stopped moving.
Sota-Nul hung in the air, the twitching body of the tech-priest hugged closed, cables and articulated arms pulsing and squirming. Dark liquid siphoned down lengths of transparent tubes. Argonis thought he saw arcs of electricity running through the liquid. The tech-priest’s body began to crumble, its shape seeming to lose structure and substance. Sota-Nul gathered the shrinking ball of its mass into her chest. A wet pulsing sound washed through the air for a long moment. Then she withdrew her array of machine limbs, and the black robes fell back into place. She turned on the spot, the shadowed hole beneath her hood pointing at Argonis.
‘I said–’ he began, but the tech-witch spoke over him.
‘The eightfold wheel must be given its due. It is their work that we do.’ She turned away, and drifted further down the platform. Argonis felt anger flair inside his thoughts, and then quickly crushed the instinct. Events were rolling now, blinking from instant to instant as time became a pressure wave of momentum. He began to run in Sota-Nul’s wake. The tech-witch was singing, a low brittle noise, which ground against the throb of the datastacks. She turned as she moved, head tilted as though listening. Argonis kept his eyes moving across the shadows. Amber threat markers danced and dissolved into nothing.
Sota-Nul stopped at last. She floated in place, her sharp-edged song growing, and then she too rose into the air. A pair of silvered tentacles slipped out of her. They squirmed through the air, reaching blindly into space. At last she stopped and drifted to a panel set high in the cliff-face of a machine. Argonis had no idea how she had selected the location or how she had known it was there. The twin tentacles slid out, slithering over the machine’s surface, and then into sockets.
Sota-Nul jerked, and became rigid. She began to shake. The datastack began to rumble. Argonis felt his hair rise inside the shell of his helm. He sheathed his blade. His bolter was in his hand. His helmet system was pinging warnings into his ears.
‘It… is…’ called Sota-Nul, her voice rolling higher and higher within each word. ‘So innocent.’
Amber threat runes were moving across his sight as he turned his head. Out there in the gloom between the stacks things were moving.
‘Come on!’ he called, the need for silence banished by the need for haste. Sota-Nul’s whole body was pulsing, swelling and contracting, as though she were breathing in, as though she were swallowing something larger than herself. Argonis could see the shapes of the things moving amongst the stacks, the glitter of machine eyes staring at him. Lines of targeting light began to flicker out through the dark. He raised his bolter. Target runes began to flash between red and amber.
‘We go now!’ he called.
Sota-Nul shivered, and then pulled away, silver tentacles yanking from the stack. She trembled in the air for a second and then began to spiral downwards towards him. Machine voices were rising from the dark. Sota-Nul landed and began to glide back towards the lift platform. He followed at a run.
‘What did you see?’ he called as the metal grating shook beneath his feet. ‘What did you find?’
‘A nothing,’ she hissed, her voice dreamlike.
‘Nothing?’
The lift shaft opened to greet them. Prophesius stood above the still supine form of Taldak. The doors began to close behind them.
‘Not nothing,’ said Sota-Nul. ‘A nothing.’
Prophesius was scratching words onto his wax tablet.
do you wish the iron one to wake?
‘A nothing?’ Argonis called.
<
br /> Sota-Nul nodded slowly.
‘An absence,’ she said, ‘a void, a thing that is not there.’
do you wish to wake?
‘What do you mean?’
‘They have lied to you.’
to wake?
He stood and stared at her for a second. He had known it, had been all but certain ever since he looked in Perturabo’s eyes, but he had hoped that he would not find a reason to bring fresh news of treachery to his father. He had hoped that in this war of broken vows some bonds stayed true.
Lights set into the shaft walls were flashing past as they descended. He turned to Prophesius, and thought of the key to the iron mask, cold against his neck. Then he looked back to Sota-Nul.
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘No,’ she replied, her metal snakes working inside the platform’s control panels. The platform began to move even faster, sinking into the shaft beneath. ‘We must see it.’
The platform came to a halt two full minutes later. Quietness settled into the air. Argonis found it almost unsettling. His hearts were beating adrenaline-spiced blood through his limbs. Tactical markers were spinning in his sight, telling him that the air was cool here, but tinged with exotic chemicals. Ambient sound was almost nothing, just the distant noise of machinery stirring air. Sota-Nul extended a set of metal snakes into the controls beside the door. Sparks and smoke puffed into the air, and the doors opened. The corridor beyond was smooth rockcrete. Bare lumen-strips ran down its centre. Another small door of reinforced plasteel lay in the distance. Chipped hazard stripes marked its edges.
‘You are sure?’ he asked, keeping his eyes on the corridor.
Sota-Nul glided up beside him, metal tentacles slithering back beneath her robe.
‘Yes, this is it. Not the main means of entrance-exit, but it should take us to it. The likelihood of detection is high.’ She rotated her head towards him. He found himself imagining a grin hidden beneath the hood. ‘You might even have to get your weapons dirty.’
‘The records gave no indication of what they are keeping here?’
‘None, just the name-signifier buried under three cipher layers. They called it Black Oculus.’
‘Black Oculus…’ he let the phrase hang in the air.
He glanced back at the still unconscious form of Taldak, and then at Prophesius. He nodded and stepped into the passage. The tech-witch and the astropath followed. They moved fast. The next door opened to Sota-Nul’s touch, as she fed it the codes she had culled from the datastacks.
More corridors followed, all bare, all quiet. He did not like that, not at all. The air and light changed the further they went. A haze hung on the edge of sight, blurring the edges of walls and the details of distant objects. Shadows clung to recesses like folds of black cloth, while the lumen-strips shone brighter, but gave less light. The rhythm and regularity of deserted chambers and silent corridors began to press into his mind. He caught his concentration wandering several times. He would blink and realise he had walked several steps, and was not even aware of taking them. Every time he would pull himself back to focused awareness, only for it to drain away. It was difficult to tell if the tech-witch was affected, but Prophesius’s hands clasped and twitched the further they went. The silence deepened, and the fog in their awareness thickened.
It almost killed them.
Another hatch door had swung open, and Argonis had been stepping through, gun pointing by habit as much as intent. The Iron Warrior standing on the other side of the hatch turned, bolter rising. A slowed sensation of shock ran up Argonis’s spine. His senses cleared in a cold rush. He kicked the Iron Warrior’s gun. The casing slammed back into the warrior’s chestplate. Two rounds roared from the muzzle and hit the wall. Gunshot echoes, dust and smoke flooded the passage.
Argonis came forward fast, slamming his fist into the Iron Warrior three times before he was halfway to the floor. His mind was a sudden focused line, all hot fury and bared teeth. The lenses in the Iron Warrior’s helm shattered. Blood misted from the broken sockets with his first and second blow. The Iron Warrior was falling, most likely blinded, but he was far from dead and brought his gun up as he fell.
The decision occurred so fast in Argonis’s mind that he was barely aware of its passing. He fired his bolter. The round hit the Iron Warrior in the chest, exploded and punched the warrior back into the wall. Argonis fired three times more: once into the throat joint, once into each eyepiece, each shot a sliver of time apart. The Iron Warrior’s head and neck exploded.
Argonis moved forward, gun ready, tracking the space beyond the headless corpse. Nothing, just a section of corridor with another small door in the wall opposite, and a large, circular hatch to his left. His helmet display fizzed as he stepped closer to the circular hatch, and then dissolved into a blur. Squawks of distortion rose from his vox. He pulled the helm off, and looked back at his two companions.
Sota-Nul was already gliding close.
‘Very clean,’ she said, the slight twitch of her hood indicating the dead Iron Warrior. ‘Apart from the first instant when he nearly killed you. But the three kill shots, one to ensure the throat and mouth could not call an alarm, the other two to ensure fatality. Impressive.’
Argonis did not respond. Part of his mind had simply shut off all of his thoughts about what he had just done. He had not wanted to kill the Iron Warrior, but the only other option would have been to die and to fail in his mission.
‘He may still have sent an alert,’ he said without looking at Sota-Nul. ‘He had time to speak before I fired.’
‘No,’ said the tech-witch. ‘He sent nothing. His vox was disabled, as were most of his auto-senses.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of this.’ She touched the circular hatch as she spoke. ‘You will have to open it,’ she said, and he could hear a tremor in her voice. ‘I…’ she began to say, but the word did not finish and she drifted to the floor.
He noticed Prophesius then. The astropath was still by the door they had entered through. He was trembling. His hand was jumping across his wax tablet, writing the same thing again and again.
…black star, black star, black star, black star, black star…
Argonis turned back to the hatch. A wheel sat at its centre. He could see no other lock, just the blank space and loose cables where an access system had been. He reached out and gripped the wheel. His armour was moving with slow creaks and groans of resistance, as though its system were failing. He began to turn the wheel. It spun until he heard a heavy clank from within. Then he pulled the hatch, his protesting armour grinding as he heaved it wide.
The space beyond was dark, and the light coming from behind Argonis halted at the door as though a barrier prevented its passing. He stepped across the threshold. The dark closed over him. For a heartbeat he could see nothing, then his eyes adjusted, and a scene in stark monochrome formed in front of him.
Thin human figures hung from frames of metal. Chains hooked into loops bonded to their arms and scalps. Some bore mutations: additional limbs of shrivelled muscle and stark bone, translucent scales, back-jointed legs, fingers grown to crescents of pale bone. A thick metal band circled each of their heads. Needle-tipped tubes connected their bare skin to bottles of liquid. A turn of his head told Argonis that there were dozens of them in the chamber. His eyes ached as he looked at them, and a dull crackle hummed in his ears.
He knew what they were, or at least what they had been. They were Navigators, dozens of Navigators chained in the dark and sedated. He stepped closer. His armour was a dead weight pulling against his muscles. The first figure he reached was a starvation-thin woman. Slowly he pulled the needles from her flesh. He waited, feeling the instincts in his spine and limbs telling him to get back into the light.
He waited, and time waited with time.
The Navigator’s head came up. She gasped air to scream.
Then she went still, then tilted her head, first one way and then another. Argonis did not move or speak.
‘I see you,’ she said, and her voice was a cold shiver of sound. ‘I see you, son of the moon-wolf.’
‘What are you?’ he asked.
‘What are we? We are those who have looked into the light of eternity. We are the ones who have seen the black star.’
…black star… black star… black star… The words repeated in his thoughts, trailing down to silence.
‘The black star?’ he asked, and found that his lips were dry.
‘The dark heart of all things. It was there, and we passed into it and through it, our eyes wide. And we saw…’ The Navigator’s voice caught, and for a second terror trembled her words. ‘We saw all things. The black star… the circle beneath… the Gateway to the Gods… the Eye of Terror sees all.’ She turned her head and looked at Argonis. He felt the look. It felt like ice, like falling, and falling without ever finding the release of the ground. ‘It is here. It is within. And…’ she was trembling again, limbs shaking the frame that bound her. ‘And it is looking back at us.’
He left the chamber, and closed the hatch on the darkness and the sleeping Navigators within.
Sota-Nul had withdrawn to the hatch they had entered by. Her shape was swelling and deflating as he watched her, and there was no sign of either the corpse or the blood which had spattered the floor and walls. Argonis walked towards them, his armour moving more freely with each step he took from the door.
‘We have to reach the Iron Blood,’ he said, as he ducked into the passage that led back the way they had come. ‘We have to reach Perturabo.’