The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  Apollonia. He had read that name on bloodstained pages in the deep archives on Titan. Fragments of prophecy, lore on the nature of the warp and its potential – he had seen all marked with the glyph of the moon whose image now revolved before him. He knew now where those pages of lore had come from he had not known until now.

  So many secrets. One layered upon another until it becomes our skin, until it becomes armour.

  But that was the point, he realised; there was no absolute armour, nothing which could be buried so deep that it could not be found.

  He waved a hand and the projected moon shrank. Apollonia became a speck, pirouetting without a care against the swirled background of her parent planet. The moon’s necklace of weapon stations vanished. The silent drifts of torpedoes and mines waiting in cloud banks became a smudge of distortion. There were defences enough around Apollonia to turn back a small fleet, but it was not a small fleet that they would face. If Ahriman had learned what he needed from Inquisitor Iobel then he would come with all his might. The defences would not stand that.

  And so we race through the warp, thought Cendrion, and hope that we are in time. Around him he felt the creak of the Sigillite’s Oath’s shields as the warp tried to grip its hull. It was a fast ship, fast beyond what most would believe possible. Far behind her, lost in the shattered swirl of the warp, a greater fleet followed, heavy with warships loaded with fleet-breaking fire power.

  But will even that be enough? He was not a pessimist; he was a warrior, and a warrior could allow himself no false hope. Truth is our weapon, as ignorance is a shield.

  Cendrion shivered. His armour buzzed in sympathy.

  ‘Cold, my friend?’

  Cendrion kept every part of his features set, but inside he stiffened. Izdubar stepped up beside him. The inquisitor had donned armour. Black lacquered plates hid his slight body, and a sable cloak hung from his shoulders. A tri-barred ‘I’ ran down the moulded muscle of his chest, wreathed in silver laurels. A tiny daemon’s skull with ruby eyes stared from the symbol’s centre.

  Izdubar raised his hand in front of him, thumb and forefinger held apart, as though he was sighting through them at the holo display of Apollonia.

  Izdubar’s thumb and finger snapped shut. The inquisitor held his hand still for a second then dropped it with a sigh of servos.

  ‘If only it were so easy,’ breathed Izdubar. ‘Take what is at this moment one of the greatest dangers to mankind and make it vanish with a snap of our fingers.’

  Cendrion shifted, and his silvered armour sighed as it moved with his muscles. He bore no sword, and though that was right and proper, it made him feel uneasy. Within him a fragment of his subconscious spoke the words of detestation and the names of the fallen in a never-ending litany. He listened to the thoughts rise and fall in rhythm. Far off on the edge of his awareness he heard the minds of his brothers, each an echo of his own. The Sigillite’s Oath was just one ship, but seventy-three Grey Knights walked its decks, their minds like torches beside the thousands of candle flames spread through the rest of the ship. Comfort was not a concept he easily understood, but in moments like these he came close to understanding what it must mean to humans.

  ‘You think that I had that power already?’ said Izdubar, as though in answer to a remark that Cendrion had not made. ‘That I should have destroyed the Athenaeum? If it no longer existed, then Ahriman and his kind would not seek it. We would not now be at risk of letting it fall into his hands.’ The inquisitor rested his hands on the brass rail which circled the cupola. ‘Yes, I could have done that long ago, with a word, with a… a click of my fingers.’

  Cendrion turned to look at Izdubar. The man looked young, but was not. Two hundred years, three hundred? Cendrion was not certain, but in all the time he had known Izdubar the inquisitor had never seemed to age, as though he did not have time for it. Direct, deep, ruthless: those were the words which followed Izdubar. Cendrion supposed others found those qualities admirable, but he just found Izdubar unsettling, like a weapon whose balance never felt true but no one could understand why.

  ‘One gesture and it could all have been gone, but what then? What would we lose? The war we fight is a war of knowledge, and we cannot fight what we do not understand. Destroy this and we blind ourselves. And does it not serve a purpose? A light that draws our enemies to us just as fires once drew wolves to our ancestors. We do not act only as protectors here, Cendrion.’ Izdubar looked up from the star field, his eyes emotionless but glinting with reflected light. ‘We are hunters.’

  The Wolves rode on the edge of the storm. It rolled and roared around Hel’s Daughter, rattling its hull with fury. It had begun soon after they had returned to the warp after clearing the Cadian Gate. The storm had grown even as they had tried to outrun it, as though it was pushing them before it. Grimur did not like that; it was an ill omen, one amongst so many.

  ‘The moon broken at midwinter looks at us,’ rasped Sycld from where he lay on the floor. Ice radiated from the Rune Priest’s body and climbed the navigation chamber’s walls. Blood marked Sycld’s lips, and formed pink crystals on his cheeks. ‘Silver are the warriors of blade and book, and they come to the fire.’

  Grimur touched the fragment of red iron on its thong about his neck. They had been riding the bow wave of the storm for days now, and all the while Sycld dreamed and Grimur watched over him, axe in hand. The Rune Priest’s dream was the thread leading them on towards Ahriman, but it was taking its toll. Sycld’s skin was snow white beneath its crust of ice, his face so hollow it seemed a skull. Grimur did not want to know how Sycld was holding onto his dream hunt. Other Rune Priests guided the other ships, but each followed Sycld’s lead; he was the master of the pack, the strongest, and the one who saw the path most clearly.

  What if he fails now? thought Grimur. What if the evil that has touched us worms its way into his flesh? What if I have to cut his thread?

  ‘The king without a land, with a blade like the moon in his hand,’ gasped Sycld, and Grimur’s fingers twitched on the haft of his axe. Around him the witch ice thickened on the navigation chamber’s walls, and the storm beat on their hull.

  ‘Peace, brother,’ whispered Grimur, although he did not know why. ‘Lead us true. Do not fail us now.’

  A storm was coming. Silvanus lay on the floor of his tower and wept. The tears were pink with blood against his white skin. He could feel the warp itch and tug at the edges of his thoughts. They had ridden a storm to reach Apollonia, and now it seemed to have followed them, circling the moon, its growing fury grating against reality like claws. He could taste it, could see it sometimes out of the corner of his eyes when he opened them. He kept them clamped shut now, but even in the darkness behind his eyelids the storm still laughed at him.

  ‘Go away,’ he moaned. ‘Please, please leave me alone.’

  The chamber door hissed open. Silvanus did not look up. It would be one of the other slaves come to bring him food, or… He did not care who it was. The storm was inching closer with every beat of his heart. The laughter was a raw chuckle of sharpening steel and dry bones now.

  The floor rang like a struck gong. Silvanus looked up, eyes wide. Colours blurred and mixed at the edge of his sight, but even through his tears he could see the shape that stood above him. It towered to the ceiling, a brutal approximation to a human form made from pistons and flame-orange plating.

  ‘What are you…’ he began, then realised what he was talking to, and swallowed. Above him Credence cycled its shoulder plates. The whir of gears grumbled like a resigned sigh.

  ‘Navigator.’ The word boomed from its speaker grilles. Silvanus clamped his hands over his ears, but in the ringing echo he recognised the recorded voice of Ignis. The cannon on Credence’s back turned from side to side, before arming with a cold metal clang. ‘You. Come. With. Me.’

  The seismic shell rushed into the void on a tongue of flame. Twenty-seven milliseconds later its secondary charge fired. Rockets drove the fifty-metre-long me
tal dart down into gravity’s grasp. Thin atmosphere skidded down its length. Its point began to glow. Thirty-six seconds after it had left the muzzle of its gun, it shed its primary rockets. Curved sheets of ceramite came free, caught the moon’s atmosphere and snapped away. Now a finned blade of silver, the warhead fell, spinning, drawing a luminous line across the moon’s black sky. Inlaid patterns of golden wire began to melt from the warhead casing. White-yellow drops formed spirals in its wake. The slim silver arrow struck the grey crust and vanished. Dust plumed into the thin air, rising high on the weak gravity. Driving deep, its adamantine casing glowed as it drilled through rock and compacted dust.

  The warhead reached its final depth and detonated. It had lived in flight for a hundred and seventy-two seconds. The surface of the moon crazed around the impact site, collapsed and then exploded upwards. The ground rippled like water, dust rising in waves across grey dune seas. Rocks sheared and slumped into chasms. At the centre of the detonation a jagged wound stared up through the spreading clouds of dust like a shattered pupil in a blind eye.

  Ignis watched as the breaking of Apollonia’s surface unfolded across his helmet display. His armour was shaking around his flesh, ringing in time with the Word of Hermes’s rolling fire. In his right eye the latticework of fire and explosions above the moon multiplied in complexity.

  The moon’s defences were still active. Slaved weapon platforms, drifts of mines and deadfall torpedoes glittered like chains of jewels hung against the sable of space. The defences were formidable indeed, but not enough, never enough. Grids of turbolaser fire reached out towards the ships of Ahriman’s fleet. Energy shields shattered. The fleet replied. Torpedoes slid into weapon platforms to explode in flowers of white light. Broadsides of plasma fire sliced through orbital stations. Globules of burning matter tumbled through a haze of vented gas and liquid. The numbers, the timings, the angles, all were just parts of a growing pattern which he had set in motion and he controlled.

  Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he felt a silent chuckle shiver through him. He stood at the pattern’s centre, his mind linked to a psyker on each of the vessels, his soul feeling the warp echo as the numbers and angles built and built. The warp spun around the moon, spiralling into it like a whirlpool, pressing close, thinning the skin of all things. The moon itself glowed like a sun in his mind. Space close to it blurred with skeins of colour. Distances seemed to change as he looked at them, and smudges of unlight crackled across its surface. He could see it with his soul, like lightning bleaching storm clouds to white. It had been a long time since he had let the ratios of ruin have full sway, and the possibility was just too tempting, and far, far too dangerous.

  Ignis shook his head, and went back to watching his ships strip Apollonia’s defences a piece at a time. Another weapons platform fragmented into fire. Thick lines of las-light flickered out from another platform and drew a line across the hull of a ship, slicing off sheets of pale bone and oily blue growth from the hull. The ship rolled, its engines misfiring.

  The Synetica, thought Ignis, and recalculated the fleet’s effectiveness based on this loss. Numbers spun through his awareness. His hearts beat faster, as wild deviations entered into the matrix of destruction. The Synetica exploded, its hulls bursting with fire like a corpse bloated with air. Behind the fire cloud the rest of the fleet moved around the moon. Flowers of plasma bloomed amongst the las-light and the stitched lines of turret fire. It was beautiful to Ignis’s eyes, a sculpture in calculation etched in fire. The calculations resolved and became a sum which reached into the infinite. All was ready.

  +Surface breach open,+ he sent.

  Astraeos lay bound to his bed of steel. Consciousness returned to him again, and with it came pain. The empty sockets of his eyes ached with the dull rhythm of his pulse. The bolts securing the metal hood to his scalp were hard points of sharpness. The needles linked to the tangle of injector tubes twitched every now and again, as they sucked blood from his veins and pumped drugs in. Over it all the sickening shadow of his warp-blocking guardians smothered every thought and sensation in a coiling blackness. The shackles were vibrating against his flesh. The edges had rubbed and cut into the meat of his arms. And he could feel dry blood layering his skin.

  This time when he awoke he made no sound. He had already emerged from the drug coma several times over the last… in fact he had no idea how long it had been since the inquisitor had left. There had just been dreams in which he would see the home world of his Chapter burn again and again. The dream always ended in the last moments before he fled the inferno. He would look back through the flames and see the silver warriors, and the Dreadnought striding at their head. He would wake, as now, to the bitter sharpness of his imprisonment. He would lie for a few moments in the blackness of his blindness, then the needles would jerk in his flesh, and the drugs cast him back to his dreams of a burning fortress and a dying world.

  He kept his breathing low, his pulse controlled. The vibration of the shackles and the slab beneath him was a new sensation to wake to. He thought he knew what it was – battle. The ship he was on was firing its guns and receiving fire, recoil and explosions juddering its metal bones. He tried to judge the severity of the battle from the shudder of the metal; intense was his guess, a big storm of a fight.

  Is this the death of Ahriman? he wondered. Have I woken to the moment when the Inquisition enact their execution? A hollow space opened within him at the thought. My last oath broken.

  He felt his pulse rise, fought to slow it, but too late. A machine chimed nearby.

  ‘Biorhythms rising,’ said a metallic voice. He heard a rustle of fabric and a click of gears as the tech-priest came close. He opened his mouth, drew breath. The needles in his flesh twitched and he felt the dull hammer of the sedatives fall.

  ‘No–’ he managed, and then he was falling back into soft darkness and the rising crackle of memories.

  Hemellion sat and listened to the scrape of steel on stone. Every now and again, he stopped and raised the crescent of metal up, so that its edge caught the light of the oil lamp. He turned the blade over, watching its sharpness emerge. A distant clunk rang dully through the small room. Beside him the flame from the bowl of burning oil fluttered. He turned his eyes up to the shadow-clung corners of the chamber. The sound faded. He dropped his head and started sharpening again.

  The blade had been a piece of metal he had pulled from the edge of a floor. He had been sharpening it for days now. First by the light of the glow-globes, then in the half dark when the globes had failed a few hours before.

  He began again. The stone scraped down the edge, and he listened as it became sharper.

  He thought of Helana back on Vohal, scraping a stone down the edge of her sword every morning. She had stopped every now and then, raised the sword, looked at the edge and continued. Ten years. Ten years of keeping her blade sharp to protect him from assassins. She had been one of the last to die. He thought of looking down into the fortress courtyard on so many mornings, of the sparks flying into cold winter air as the grindstone sharpened swords, and scythes, and knives. He thought of the corpses he had seen in the last days before Vohal died. Ragged smiles grinned up at him from necks, and he saw the knives still clasped in the hands of the corpses who lay furthest from the others. Mercy, a gift given at a knife’s edge at the end of hope.

  He thought, and listened to the whisper of the stone on the blade’s edge.

  He thought of the dust on the cracked lips of starving mouths.

  Dust.

  That was all that remained.

  Dust scattered on the wind, dropped from an uncaring hand.

  Ahriman’s eyes had looked down at him, and then Sanakht’s.

  He thought, and thought, his memories winding around his hate. He did not think of the passing time, or of the shake and shudder of the ship, or why he thought of it now as a ship and not a city. He did not wonder why no other thoughts entered his mind, or what he was going to do. He though
t of the blade, of the razor scrape of the stone on its edge, of its sharpness.

  +Send us,+ sent Ahriman. Light shot into the air from the serpentine patterns cut into the floor. Sanakht felt the warp twist around them. He fought to keep his head from spinning. He stood beside Ahriman. Beside them sixteen Rubricae stood in two perfect circles. The chamber was a blur beyond a brilliant curtain. Rainbow light shattered from the crystal pyramid above them.

  Sanakht’s lips peeled back from his teeth as pressure built in his skull. The transposition to the inside of Apollonia was possible only now that its shell was broken. Wild currents of warp energy surrounded the moon like a shifting mesh. Something about the moon itself seemed to cause these distortions, as though to protect it from exactly what Ahriman was doing. Opening up a gate through such a tangle of warp eddies and streams was close to suicide.

  The breach blown in the moon’s crust by the seismic charge had opened a channel of opportunity. That channel was narrow and dangerous, but Ahriman was still going to take it. They could have dropped into the labyrinth by gunship, but he had wanted to get as close to the core of the moon as possible. That, at least, was what he had said.

  The curtains of light surrounding Sanakht and Ahriman turned blinding white. Ahriman’s focused power screeched around Sanakht’s mind. The chamber vanished around them and he was streaking through oblivion like a burning arrow shot at the night sky.

  XVII

  PATTERNS

  Darkness ahead, darkness behind, thought Sanakht, as he followed Ahriman. The tunnel around them was circular and completely smooth, as though carved from the black rock by water. No light reflected from the walls, floor or ceiling. The Rubricae’s eyes shone cold and lifeless in their helms, but did nothing more than sketch the lines of their armoured heads. Even his helmet display could not pierce the gloom. The warp did not help either. He had tried to reach out with his mind, but at once had found his focus ripped away as though caught in a racing river.