The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  The Labyrinth. That was what Ahriman had called it, and Sanakht now understood why. The moon was not solid. Tunnels extended beneath its surface, forming a vast honeycomb of polished black rock. At its core, at the end of a path twisted through the dark, lay the Athenaeum. The warp was here, running through the walls and the still air of the tunnels, pouring down to some invisible depths. It was not just a labyrinth in the physical realm, it was a labyrinth of the psyche. It felt familiar, though he had no idea why, like walking through the ruin of a long-lost home. How deep they had descended or how far there remained to go, he did not know. Ahriman alone moved with purpose, floating ahead of them, robes rippling as though in an invisible wind.

  Sanakht felt the sudden tug of the secret that he had buried within himself beneath layers of thought baffles and masking. It nestled there, warm and tempting with its promise. It would begin soon. No, he would not allow it to come to the surface. Not yet. He was too close and there was still too much risk.

  Ahead of him he saw Ahriman twitch, and then stop. The Rubricae froze around him. Sanakht felt his hearts still. Had his mask of surface thoughts slipped? Had Ahriman looked deeper into his mind for some reason? No – he would have known. Weak as he was, he would have known, and besides what cause would Ahriman have not to trust him?

  +Is something amiss?+ asked Sanakht, and heard his thoughts echo as real sound.

  ‘Amiss… amiss… amiss…’

  +Is this labyrinth different from what the inquisitor told you?+

  ‘Told you… you… you…’

  Ahriman turned where he hung, and looked up as though at a sky which was not there.

  ‘It is not a labyrinth,’ said Ahriman with his true voice. No echo followed. ‘These tunnels and the warp currents which surround them are simply a by-product of how it formed. It is a map, carved out of the moon’s cold core by the warp. The whole structure is a stabilised ball of substance and aether.’

  ‘It was made by chance?’ said Sanakht.

  Ahriman’s reply cracked dully through the air.

  ‘No, nothing here is chance. Its passages are a map of trickery and deceit, and the warp vibrates through it.’ Ahriman pivoted back to face the darkness ahead. ‘It was made by thoughts pouring from beyond into reality. It is an echo of those thoughts, like a footprint left on the soft sand beside an ocean.’

  The Rubricae clattered back into motion as Ahriman glided forwards. Sanakht followed, his hand brushing the pommels of his swords.

  ‘Whose thoughts?’ asked Sanakht, as he came level with Ahriman. ‘You said that this place was shaped by thoughts, but whose?’

  ‘Our father’s,’ said Ahriman.

  Hemellion stepped onto the Sycorax’s bridge. He stopped, staring down at the worn brass of the floor, noticing the old marks cut into the head of each rivet.

  Why am I here? He knew where he was. He had been here before, many times. He knew that, knew that this was the… bridge? Yes. That was it. He knew that this was the centre of the ship…

  But what is a ship?

  A figure moved past him, moving fast, its tattered robe flicking in its wake. He blinked. He was not sure he knew what a ship was or why he knew that he stood on one, but he knew that it did not matter, and neither did why he was here. All that mattered was that he was here.

  He looked up, his eyes slowly focusing. Something was happening. He could see figures moving about the tiered pits of metal sunk into the bridge’s deck. They wore yellow and had masks like animals. He stared at one. Its mask was in the shape of a snake or a lizard with scales of opal.

  Cyrabor… Was that their name? It felt like it should be.

  More cries filled the air, rising over the metal clatter. There was some kind of panic, he was sure, but it all seemed very distant. He was where he needed to be, and that was good.

  He looked down at his hands. They looked old. How had that happened?

  No. That was right, he was old. He had grown and lived on a world of stone, and rain. He was not there now, he was here, on a ship…

  He began to shuffle forwards. The silver chains around his ankles clinked against the brass floor. No one seemed to look at him. Shouts and clanks of metal echoed up to the high roof above. Black smoke chugged from a cluster of slab-like machines. Strange thick smells filled his mouth and nose. He kept moving, weaving between hurrying Cyrabor. In the distance the command throne rose above the smoke, sound and rushing figures. He could see a red figure on the throne, made small by distance and the vastness of the chamber.

  In the folds of his robe the sharpened sickle of metal sat in his hand. It felt cold. He could not remember why he had it, or where it had come from, but that did not matter. All that mattered was that he was here.

  He kept moving.

  Ignis glanced up as Credence came to stand beside him. He did not need to ask if the Navigator was secure; he could feel the pathetic man’s thoughts scratching at the walls of his new prison.

  The automaton clattered and buzzed at him.

  ‘All is well,’ he said, then nodded to himself. It was true, all was as it should be, every piece was in place, every factor in the pattern calculated, and every progression unfolding on its necessary path. His mind was connected to other minds throughout the fleet. Some of those minds commanded ships, some simply stood beside those that did. That web of coordination had been necessary to get Ahriman into the correct position, but it was not necessary now, at least not in the same configuration. He broke the connection to several minds, and focused on others, bringing them to the surface. They had all been waiting for this moment; all of them stood ready to act.

  +Now,+ he sent, and in his mind the pattern bloomed into full life.

  Carmenta saw the first shots and thought it was a mistake. Ahriman’s fleet was spread in high orbit above Apollonia. Some clustered together, others spread far apart, arranged by Ignis in a pattern that she had not tried to understand. The last of the moon’s defences had been stripped and most of the ships had settled into silence.

  The Malicant was the first ship to move. Shaped like a serrated spearhead of soot-crusted copper, it was the warship of Mavahedron and his slave clans. It pirouetted away from the rest of the fleet on a burst of thrust. Carmenta watched it, her sensors drawn by the movement. The Malicant fired its guns. Light raked the void, and exploded around a pair of black-hulled frigates. Carmenta saw the shockwave as their shields collapsed, and suddenly time was crawling as surprise flooded her. The Malicant fired again, and the frigates exploded one after another.

  Then time snapped forwards, and more ships were breaking formation and firing. Sound exploded from the vox. Cries of shock and rage rang through Carmenta’s sensors. Fire slashed the dark. Shields burst. Plasma and laser energy carved into hulls, and atmosphere vented into the void. Where there had been order, there was now a spinning tangle of ships scrambling to bring their guns to bear. Where there had been a single fleet there was now the fire and rage of battle.

  Treachery, or terrible error, it did not matter; Ahriman’s fleet was tearing itself apart. She had always doubted that the ties of allegiance binding the fractured warbands together would hold, and now they were shattering before her eyes. She would not allow it. Orders flowed from Carmenta into the Sycorax. She began to turn, her sensors reaching for firing solutions, tiered batteries of her guns rotating to targets.

  She froze. The impulses commanding her weapons teetered on the edge of completion. She had missed something, something obvious yet significant. She gazed at the ships spinning wildly above Apollonia, at the streaks of flame and the fires kindling in wounded hulls. Then she realised what had held her will from firing. None of the ships tearing at each other had fired on her. She sat untouched, while the rest of Ahriman’s fleet began to burn.

  No, not all of the rest. She saw it then, the ships that floated amongst the unfolding carnage, untouched, serene.

  What was this? What was happening?

  She thought of her words to Ah
riman.

  ‘Remember that they followed Amon once, and that they tried to destroy you.’

  She felt numb. Treachery: it was the only answer. Ahriman had gone, and now his enemies moved against him.

  Her will surged into her guns, and her sensors reached and locked onto targets.

  The silver ship ripped into existence with an exploding pressure wave of aetheric energy.

  The Sigillite’s Oath punched through the fabric of reality like an arrow through ragged cloth. Its engines burned to nova brightness. Around the fire-ringed moon of Apollonia ships began to turn like vulture heads looking up from a corpse. The strike cruiser accelerated, twisting its course into a corkscrew as the first distant salvoes streaked past it. Its own guns were still out of range, but would not be for long.

  Transit from the warp to reality was dangerous. Making that jump within the bounds of a star system was suicidal. The smallest of navigational errors and a ship could exit into the heart of a sun or the core of a planet. Few ships ever attempted such a feat and survived, but that was exactly what the Sigillite’s Oath had done. Steered by the finest Navigators in the Imperium, it had cut through the warp storm gathering around Apollonia, and emerged almost on top of Ahriman’s fleet.

  Cendrion felt the backwash from the warp exit spill over him as he marched through the pulsing yellow alert light. His brothers marched beside him. The clank and hiss of armour echoed in time with the ring of their strides. The shriek of torn reality was fading in his mind, but he could taste the rise of the growing storm. It tasted of lightning and blood. Above it the psychic voices of the Eighth Brotherhood rose in communion.

  +Mahalalel stands ready.+

  +Iofiel stands ready.+

  +Gadal stands ready.+

  The sendings soared through Cendrion’s awareness. He could feel the ghosts of his brothers’ thoughts. Barakon’s psycannon was a brief weight in his hands. The dark closed over him as the hatch of a Stormraven hissed shut behind Sabaoc. Pain itched up his spine and neck as he was Anak waking in the embrace of his Dreadnought coffin. He listened, allowing the walls between his mind and his brothers’ minds to dissolve. They were one, a brotherhood joined in blood and soul.

  +Strike force Ishen stands ready. Launch pattern locked. The blade is drawn.+

  +Strike force Sangrian stands ready. The blade is drawn.+

  +Strike force Caspian stands ready. Teleportation targets confirmed. The blade is drawn.+

  ‘They have already broken through to the labyrinth fortress?’ Izdubar’s words pulled at Cendrion’s focus. The inquisitor lord strode ahead of him, his oil-black armour gleaming in the pulsing light. The two other inquisitors, Malkira and Erionas, walked beside him. Both were armed and armoured. Malkira was a giant of pistons and chrome, Erionas a spectre in grey robes and layered red plate. Cavor followed them, his body bulked in an armoured enviro-suit. Holstered pistols and bandoliers of bullets clinked in time with his steps.

  ‘Apollonia’s surface is breached,’ said Erionas. He was breathing hard, as though not used to moving so swiftly. ‘An assault is likely to be in progress. But…’ Erionas stopped in his tracks, crystal eyes dancing with data.

  ‘What?’ barked Izdubar.

  ‘The enemy fleet is firing on itself.’

  ‘An unexpected advantage,’ nodded Izdubar. ‘How long until the rest of the fleet catches up to us?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ said Erionas. ‘The storm is rising up fast. Perhaps they will not arrive at all.’

  ‘Then we stand alone,’ said Izdubar.

  They turned a corner and a blast door peeled open in front of them. Before them a wide chamber opened and spread into the distance on either side. Machines towered into the space above, crawling with lightning. Incense and ozone hung thick in the air.

  +Ship weapons approaching range. We are at the moment of execution.+

  Cendrion stopped at the centre of a circular depression in the deck. Behind him the thirty brothers of his strike force followed to stand in clusters around him. The inquisitors stood next to him. He could hear the pulse of their thoughts: Malkira’s eagerness bright beside Erionas’s cold indifference, Cavor’s fear of what they were about to do bleeding out of him even as he tried to control it. Above them the vast machines began to keen. The beat of the yellow alert lights rose. The warp was churning around them now, scraping the skin of reality thin.

  He glanced at Izdubar. The inquisitor lord looked back, the red eyes of his lion helm glowing bright.

  He nodded once.

  Cendrion blinked an amber rune at the edge of his sight. The yellow light became red. A heat haze blur rose around the machines.

  He looked at the red rune. Cendrion could feel the teleporters poised to reach into the warp, gripping it like fists ready to yank them through space and time. In their gunships and boarding torpedoes the rest of the brotherhood waited to be unleashed into the void.

  +Strike force Cendrion stands ready.+ He blinked the activation rune. The machines shrieked. +The blade falls.+

  Ignis was shaking. Geometry glowed in the air of the crucible. Lines and circles broke, reformed and connected into a different pattern. This was how he saw the battle as Ahriman’s fleet consumed itself, not as the projection of machines, but as arcs of warp fire cut into reality. His mind held all the values of strength, and his senses saw the death he wrought as it created geometry in the beyond. The storm rose in answer. The patterns and ratios written in death and fire pulled the billowing fury of the storm on and on, faster and faster. It was coming. It was almost complete. Almost.

  The silver ship flickered into his awareness. It streaked across the void, dancing between the fires of the slaughter. It was fast, very fast, and more importantly it should not have been there. For a second his mind just stopped. The plan, so carefully crafted, was about to fall apart.

  ‘No,’ he gasped, and the word misted cold white in the heat of the crucible. ‘No, no, no! Not now. Not now.’

  The growing pattern began to change, slowly at first then faster and faster. Lines and sacred ratios shifted, values exploded to infinities, and all the while the warp roared in the voice of an oncoming storm.

  Too fast. His mind danced with calculations realigning the fleet into a thousand possible configurations, homing in on one that would still fit.

  Behind him Credence was clattering in machine cant.

  He could still do it, he could still bring the pattern into alignment. The plan could still work…

  His mind stopped. The geometry of his battle design began to crumble into shadow and sickly light.

  It was not supposed to happen like this.

  Alarms began to shriek around him.

  The shockwave of teleportation displacement blew him across the crucible.

  He rose in time to see the silver-clad Space Marines come at him in a blur of blades and gunfire.

  +What was that?’+ Sanakht sent.

  The smooth walls of the labyrinth were ringing with the clatter of feet and the thrum of power armour. The pressure of the warp was tight around his mind. His teeth ached, and he could taste burning sugar and stagnant water. Ahriman was gliding beside him, robes rippling as though in a wind. The Rubricae marched behind.

  The walls shook again.

  +What–+

  +Battle,+ said Ahriman, still moving, not even looking around. +The Inquisition have raced to stop us before we can reach the Athenaeum.+

  +You have seen this?+

  +No, but who else could it be?+ asked Ahriman.

  Sanakht twisted to look. A glow formed in the darkness behind them, growing even as he stared at it. A high keening filled his ears.

  +How could they find us in this?+

  +It is their fortress,+ replied Ahriman. +They move swiftly, but we are close, very close. I know it.+

  Maroth began to run as soon as he was in the passage. The silver doors at the end of the narrow corridor were already glowing, the runes on their surface reacting to his presence. He
breathed a curse and they guttered to shadow.

  He had nearly left it too late. Things were moving faster than they were supposed to.

  He raised a hand and the doors hinged open before him. He bowed his head as he crossed the threshold. The chamber beyond was white with frost. Icicles hung from the chains holding his master’s host. The body floating above him had changed again. Skeletal wings hung from its shoulders, the tips of iridescent feathers budding at their edges. Its head was smooth skin broken by a wide grin of teeth. An extra set of joints had appeared in its arms and legs. It looked down at Maroth slowly. Air hissed from between its teeth. Even without eyes Maroth could see his master in his mind as a shadow defined by blue fire.

  ‘Sire,’ he began.

  +Yes.+ The daemon’s voice crackled like burning paper. +He will call me soon. This part of me must be free when that comes to pass. I must be able to go to him.+

  ‘Sire…’

  +Rise, Maroth.+

  Maroth stood slowly, head still bowed. He was shaking, his dented armour rattling.

  +You have served me well.+

  ‘Please,’ said Maroth.

  +But you are a weak soul.+ The daemon hung in silence and turned its sightless head, looking at Maroth. +You have been part of something greater than you understand.+

  ‘No.’ Maroth forced the word out of his mouth. His flesh was trembling as though he was a human child standing lost in a blizzard. He could feel his tongue burning behind his teeth. ‘No…’

  +Maroth,+ the daemon purred. Pain skewered through Maroth. He tried to cry out but his tongue had gone. He felt hands reach into his muscles, felt fingers that were not his own flex. His hand began to rise. +You will serve me once more, Maroth.+

  Maroth’s hands were reaching for the daemonhost’s pale skin. The fingertips began to burn.

  You said I would not die, he screamed inside his skull. You said I would rise.

  +You will, my broken son. You will.+

  Carmenta saw the silver ship skim the atmosphere of Apollonia and spiral back out into the fire-kissed void. It was a ghost, a blur in her sensors like a moving patch of fog. Around it the ships of Ahriman’s broken fleet spun about each other, firing and taking fire. She had to reach the silver ship, had to burn it to nothing. It was the Inquisition, she was sure. But still she did not fire.