The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  Galeo was another man who wore his wounds well. Except for the scar tissue ringing his neck like a torc, he was unbroken by a century and a half in service to the order. He scratched at his throat, an unconscious habit that always drew attention to the choker of lumpy, pale flesh.

  +Valdasca.+ His dark eyes never left her face.

  Annika met him eye for eye. Despite her Fenrisian height, she still had to crane her neck to look up at him.

  ‘I understand that you are oathbound to attend Inquisitor Harul on his ongoing operation. Nevertheless, I ask you to remain with me while I journey to the Caul. Harul can summon another force from the monastery. I want you for this duty. I want the Karabela, and I want Squad Castian.’

  Galeo smiled at the praise. Relations between the Inquisition and its Chamber Militant were always ruthlessly efficient, but they were rarely warm. Galeo considered Annika’s demeanour as something of a pleasant rarity.

  +Harul’s need is as urgent as yours. He possesses our oath of service, and his duty is closer. If you wish to retain our blades, I will need to know why.+

  For the first time, Annika looked uncertain. I’d never seen her hesitate in doubt before, and I found it a strangely compelling sight. She looked very human in that moment – so vulnerable, young and ultimately mortal.

  Humans. Sometimes it’s easy to forget how fragile they are.

  +I sense your caution, my lady,+ Galeo sent. +Commune with me.+

  He locked us out of the communion. As simple as that; as easy as a moment’s thought, he shielded his thoughts from all of us, speaking to Annika in psychic secrecy.

  Their communion lasted no more than three heartbeats. It ended when she closed her eyes and nodded.

  Galeo’s words returned to our minds. +I see. And why did you bring my kindred here, inquisitor?+

  Her honesty was admirably blunt. ‘I hoped they would trust me enough to lend their support, even if I could not reveal the mission’s details.’

  Galeo regarded us in turn. +She asks us to break an oath of service. Should we serve her and forsake one duty for another? The decision is mine to make as Justicar of Castian, but I would hear your thoughts first. What say you, brothers?+

  Sothis answered first. ‘I trust the inquisitor’s judgement. I would travel with her. Necessity or not, we are with her already.’

  ‘Let Harul summon others from the monastery,’ Malchadiel agreed. ‘The Karabela will allow her to reach her objective in a fraction of the time. A Regalia-code assignment requires nothing less.’

  Dumenidon shook his head. ‘I abstain from the decision. I have no desire to break an oath, nor turn my back on one duty to fulfil another. I will follow the judgement of my justicar.’

  Galeo nodded at each answer. +And you, Hyperion?+

  ‘I find it intriguing that she even asked us, rather than demanding our presence. I would travel at her side, if it came down to a choice.’

  +Then we will journey with Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr.+

  A tide of questioning thought rippled from each of us. Galeo moulded a reply.

  +The warship Frostborn lies dead in the void at the heart of the Valdasca Caul.+

  I could feel the tight, narrow focus of his silent voice. If a standard psychic emanation was akin to a shining a light upon a mind, this was a thin, sharp blade of communication, jabbing directly at each of us. The justicar was taking great care to ensure no nearby minds overheard his words. Each of us shifted our own speech to the same unspoken communion.

  +I know that name.+ Dumenidon leeched a touch of Galeo’s strength to respond with the same focus. The justicar offered it readily, for Dumenidon always struggled with the subtlest use of his powers. Some of us were born to be blunter instruments than others.

  We all knew the name. Annika had served aboard the Frostborn, albeit briefly. She always told those tales with a smile.

  Galeo nodded, sensing our understanding. +According to the inquisitor’s summons, an Imperial Navy patrol found a Hunter-class destroyer powered down and cold in the void, deep within the Valdasca Caul. It has been confirmed as the Frostborn. The jarl’s daughter is the closest agent of the ordos with the clearance to investigate, thus the responsibility falls to her.+

  +And to us,+ I added. Proximity to the others using their powers always strengthened my own. It was no effort at all to embrace Galeo’s psychic pulse, reform it, and push it back with my own words within. +Where was the Frostborn assigned before it met this fate?+

  It was Annika who answered, still bound to our silent speech. ‘When I left, they were bound for the Jopal and Ruis systems,’ her voice drifted through our minds.

  Jopal. Ruis. I knew those stars from my study of stellar cartography. They were close to Tisra, the star that warmed the manufactory-dense hive world of Armageddon, but there was little else of interest nearby.

  +My thanks, inquisitor. The Valdasca Caul is a far cry from Jopal and Ruis.+

  Galeo’s agreement came with a moment’s hesitation. +They were almost certainly warp-lost.+

  I was smiling behind my faceplate, and I suspect each of them knew it. +At the very least, it will be interesting.+

  ‘You sound eager,’ Malchadiel said with his true voice.

  ‘I am,’ I admitted, then added in silent speech: +I have never met a Wolf before.+

  ‘Yes.’ Annika bared her teeth in a particularly feral smile. ‘You have.’

  THREE

  DUST

  I

  The Valdasca Caul is named for the streak of ionised sulphur and hydrogen gases forming a pale, ashen nebula through the subsector’s coreward edge. The Caul blankets several suns and their respective worlds, bleaching them clean of life and drowning entire solar systems in lethal gases. Mankind has never settled here, and to my knowledge, neither have any of the xenos breeds. Few regions of the galaxy are anathema to all life, but the Caul is one of them.

  The first thing I sensed upon arrival was the raining of dust against the hull, as the clanging rattles woke me from my meditations. For a murky moment, I recalled a similar clattering: the sound of hard rain beating down on tin roofs and metal window frames. Instinct forced me to reach for the memory, but it fled as soon as I focused upon it, sifting from my mind the way sand falls through open fingers.

  It happens from time to time, these flashes of insight into a denied life. Childhood memories can tease the senses when accidentally dredged up by meditation. Such things are stripped from our psyches in the very first stages of our training, yet there are always echoes. We were born human, and despite the proximity to perfection offered by the Emperor’s Gift, we still carry a few of the flaws that plague our birth-species.

  I opened my eyes as the ship shook around me. More particulate clattered against the hull with a gritty, rattling lack of tempo. The nearby minds on other decks were wild and emboldened, fired by our arrival.

  I fastened my helm into place, gathered my weapons, and left the broken solace of my arming chamber behind.

  II

  The Khatan and Vasilla waited outside the strategium’s eastern doors, speaking in low voices. For Vasilla, this was as natural as breathing. The girl had a mouse’s voice, barely more than a whisper. By contrast, the Khatan’s voice could cut cold iron – for her to speak quietly meant the sharing of secrets.

  ‘Mistresses,’ I acknowledged them.

  ‘Master Hyperion.’ The girl pressed her palms together and offered a bow.

  The Khatan grinned, white teeth in a face the colour of burnt honey. Her dreadlocks hung down in their usual mess of dark tangles. She was the only Attilan I had ever met, but I’d studied the archives on their society. Their clans took great pride in being an unwashed people. The Khatan exemplified this cultural tendency, though it gave her an earthy, natural scent of sweat, rather than one of sloth.

  ‘Two-Guns,’ she said. ‘How do you fare, my handsome killer?’

  Her flirtation didn’t make me uncomfortable, but nor was I sure of how to respond to it. I al
ways struggled to understand the point of her humour. Perhaps that was the point of it. I was none the wiser, and had no desire to be illuminated.

  ‘Why do you remain outside?’ I asked.

  Vasilla’s youthful face was the picture of serenity. ‘We await the inquisitor,’ she said. ‘Your kindred are already within.’

  I turned to face an empty side corridor, sensing the approach of two more minds. Darford and Clovon rounded the corner together; the former clad in his impeccable dress uniform, the latter in his jacket and loose clothes. Darford smelled of clean skin and the artificial musk of his aftershave. Clovon smelled of lies and polished knives.

  ‘Which one are you?’ Darford asked me. ‘Actually, don’t tell me. I’ll get it right this time.’

  This was a game I’d grown bored of some time ago. I leaned, just slightly, to show the name etched in burnished gold lettering upon my shoulder guard.

  ‘Ah, of course,’ he said. ‘Hello, Hyperion.’

  Clovon didn’t greet me. He lingered at the edge of their group, his lacerated face turned away from me. Unlike Sothis, who bore the ruin of his visage as a legacy of honourable battle, Clovon’s wounds were the neatly arranged, symbolic marks of ritual desecration. To stand in the presence of one who had been a heretic… I felt a foul taste in my mouth from even looking at him.

  Darford ran his thumbs down the sides of his close-trimmed beard. ‘I loathe boarding actions, you know. Have I mentioned that?’

  ‘Once or twice,’ Clovon said softly.

  ‘A thousand times,’ said the Khatan with mock gravity.

  ‘No place for a sniper,’ said the uniformed soldier. ‘That’s all I’m saying. If Annika doesn’t start choosing her missions more carefully, I may just go back to Mordian and take that promotion they offered me. I’d be a colonel by now, you know. Colonel Frederic Darford of the Iron Guard. That’s got quite a ring, now I think about it.’

  The Khatan spat onto the decking. ‘Always the same whining. Enough. Spare my ears for one week.’

  The sniper’s smile was amusingly rehearsed. From prying into his mind on more than one occasion, I knew he practised in front of the mirror a great deal, seeking a smile that made him look the most handsome. He liked to think he wielded it as a weapon.

  ‘Can you even hear me, my filthy darling? Can you hear anything with all that dirt in your ears?’

  ‘Perhaps I read your babbling lips, nai-mori.’ The Khatan grinned as she used the Attilan insult for a warrior who went into battle on foot, rather than mounted on a horse. I’d read that honour duels were fought on her world over the use of that slur. As grave cultural insults went, it seemed a curious one: the equivalent to naming a man incapable of hunting for himself and his tribe, or being too weak to fight in a clan war.

  I listened to their banter, watching in silence, unsure of what to say. Any words I spoke would jar the flow of their conversation, so I opted to say nothing at all. I rarely had the chance to witness humans interacting like this.

  Clovon was watching me. His thoughts betrayed him – he had no capacity to mask his deeper thinking. The facade of disinterest was brittle, the way drying lava forms a crackable crust over the fusion of ooze beneath. He was afraid of me, and he was the kind of man to hate what he feared. You couldn’t hide emotion like that.

  Annika’s timely arrival spared anything more on the matter. Her black hair was arranged in long twin braids hanging over her shoulders, in some Fenrisian arrangement that I suspected was supposed to be either feminine or regal. Perhaps both. To me, it seemed neither.

  ‘Hyperion,’ she greeted me.

  ‘My lady.’

  ‘Were you waiting for me?’

  I had no desire for her to know I’d lingered here, captivated by the casual way humans spoke to one another. Still, I would speak no lies. Not to her.

  ‘No, my lady.’

  Her smile told me that she knew why I’d waited. She was a keen one.

  ‘Come, then.’ She gestured to the doors. ‘Let’s see what there is to see.’

  III

  The hololith flickered above the projector table in grainy, distorted mimicry of the image on the occulus screen. The Frostborn was a standard Adeptus Astartes destroyer, meaning it bristled with weaponry, statuary, jagged battlements, and was close in size and bulk to the Karabela. Our own vessel was a modified Nova-class frigate, better armed and much faster than its counterparts in the Imperial Navy or the lesser Chapters. We were the only Grey Knights on board.

  The Frostborn, an escort vessel of the Space Wolves Chapter, looked both familiar and unknown, all at once. I recognised the standard patterns of its battlements and gun batteries, yet the icons of wolves’ heads rendered it different enough to be unfamiliar.

  ‘I see no signs of battle damage.’ Malchadiel reached for the hololith, rotating it with the sensor pads in his gauntlets’ fingertips. He turned it slowly, his expression rapt. For some reason, he reminded me of a child delicately holding a family heirloom.

  ‘Definitely no battle damage,’ he confirmed.

  The strategium had its usual muted hum of activity as the serfs and servitors went about their duties. The five of us stood with the inquisitor’s team, close to the central table.

  Galeo’s voice flowed through our minds. +What of the damage along the battlements and central spine?+

  ‘Damage, yes. But it isn’t battle damage. If you look at the superficial bleaching…’ Malchadiel turned the image towards Galeo, ‘…there. The ship should be blue-grey, in the colours of the Chapter. But the armour plating is bleached and melted into this colourless nothingness. That’s the surest sign of how she took so much damage.’

  Galeo nodded, unsurprised. +I had an unpleasant feeling you would say that, brother.+

  ‘I don’t follow,’ the Khatan admitted.

  Malchadiel rotated the image again, baring the ship’s slender, skeletal back as he continued. ‘The malformations along the superstructure are almost definitely the result of aetheric scarring. The spinal concourse is torn in enough places to depressurise the entire vessel, even without the rest of this…’ he ran a fingertip along the ship’s side, ‘…this extensive damage. But none of it was inflicted by weapons used in void warfare.’

  ‘Wait.’ Darford cleared his throat. ‘Aetheric scarring?’

  Malchadiel was still cradling the ruined destroyer. ‘Damage from the warp’s tides. She was running through the warp without a Geller field.’

  ‘For how long?’ asked Annika.

  ‘Seconds. Hours. Years.’ Malchadiel shook his head. ‘There is no way of telling without plundering the onboard archives. And even that presumes the vessel’s animus machinae is still sane, and remains alive. If it’s dead, we will be unable to recover the archived information without a great deal of effort.’

  ‘Uh.’ Darford cleared his throat again. He didn’t speak High Gothic. ‘The animus machinae?’

  ‘He means the machine-spirit,’ I explained. ‘The ship’s soul. Have we detected any life signs?’

  ‘Unquantifiable,’ Malchadiel admitted. ‘There is a trace sign, but the Caul is ruinous to auspex sweeps.’

  I turned from the hololith to watch the ship itself, hanging in the void. ‘She is powerless and open to the void, and she’s survived an unshielded run through the warp. But there are trace signs of life?’

  Malchadiel wouldn’t abandon the holo-image. Its flickering green light bathed his face. ‘The mystery deepens, brothers. Do you see the damage along the second and fourth quadrants?’

  The warriors of Castian nodded, but the Khatan leaned over the table to see. Malchadiel moved the hololith away from her – a child unwilling to share a toy.

  ‘The holes?’ she asked. ‘Aren’t they the same warp wounds?’

  ‘Aetheric scarring,’ Malchadiel corrected. ‘And no, they are not. Look at the way the ablative armour is wrenched outwards, like the petals of a flower in bloom. These hull ruptures are all from internal sources. Something
inside broke its way out. Many things, judging by the number of ruptures.’

  The Khatan sniffed. ‘Your eyes are better than mine, Ironmonger.’ Malchadiel couldn’t quite resist a smile at the tribeswoman’s nickname for him.

  Darford’s sniper-eyes were a touch keener. ‘I count thirty-three hull breaks on the port side.’

  I’d counted the same. Some were large enough to drive a tank through. ‘What of the Navy vessels that found the Frostborn?’ I asked.

  Annika consulted a data-slate. ‘It was a patrol of Viper-class destroyers, led by the Indefatigable Heart. Their long-range sensors found the Frostborn, but their mandate was to ghost the edges of the Caul. The patrol captain requested – and was explicitly denied – permission to sail into the dust from the Holy Ordos.’

  ‘The Viper patrol, were they mere pirate-hunters?’ Dumenidon asked. ‘I am not familiar with the Naval vessel classes of this subsector, but I know this nebula is a haven for reavers.’

  The inquisitor nodded. ‘The Vipers were ill-equipped to deal with a threat like this,’ she confirmed. ‘It was brave of them to even ask permission to investigate.’

  ‘There’s a fine line between bravery and ignorance,’ I ventured. ‘Has there been any vox-contact with the destroyer since we arrived?’

  ‘Nothing, brother.’ Malchadiel finally released the hololithic image. Freed of his grip, it drifted into the slow roll being performed by the actual warship in the dust cloud.

  Annika wrinkled her nose. ‘Not even a distress beacon?’

  ‘No, mistress.’

  I looked at the others as they stood in silence. ‘But what of the psychic cry?’ I asked. ‘Have we managed to source it?’

  ‘The… what?’ Annika turned to me.

  Everyone turned to me.

  ‘Can’t you hear it?’ I asked, growing unsure myself now. After a moment, my gaze found Galeo. I sensed him quest out, linking with my sixth sense the way a hunting hound would snuff after a scent.

  +I hear it now,+ he said. +An indistinct whine into the warp. Human, or close enough to feign humanity with ruthless accuracy.+