The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I nodded, for I’d heard it the same way. ‘I don’t understand how the astropaths could have missed it.’

  The justicar watched me for a long moment. Judgement rode in that gaze, even hidden behind his eye lenses.

  +They missed it because it is so weak,+ he said at last. From the focus of the message, I knew it was designed only for my mind to hear. +You are growing strong, Hyperion.+

  +Thank you, justicar.+

  Annika tapped her knuckles on the table – another of her habits when concentrating. ‘The saga twists,’ she said with an annoyed sigh. ‘Very well. Go aboard. Make preparations for my team to join you as soon as it is deemed an acceptable risk.’

  She glared at the occulus where the powerless vessel turned in the void, enslaved to gentle, unfading momentum. ‘I want to see inside that ship,’ she said at last.

  We saluted as one.

  +Gunship insertion into the port docking bay.+ Galeo gestured to the sealed bay doors. +Dumenidon will lead us in the preparatory rituals. We will be aboard the Frostborn within the hour.+

  FOUR

  FROSTBORN

  I

  A Space Wolves warship. At least, the remains of one.

  In a way, it had come full circle. From birth in the frost of Fenris, it now drifted dead in the deep void, lost to ice and far from any sun. The ship’s oceans of coolant and internal oils were likely hard as diamond, blocking the internal systems beyond hope of thaw.

  My first step onto the hangar deck sent a gentle hum through my armour. With the power out and the ship open to the void, the bay was a hive of silence and zero gravity. Beyond my slow breathing, sighing through my helm’s respiratory feed, the only sound was Sothis’s murmurs as he locked his own boots to the deck behind me.

  A pair of human eyeglasses, almost certainly the former property of a Chapter serf, tapped against my shin. I glanced down at them as they drifted away. Blood flecked the corrective lenses.

  ‘The chamber is riddled with debris,’ Dumenidon voxed. ‘Personal items. Drifting rockets and ammunition crates. Several lifter/loaders. The Wolves’ one gunship and Rhino troop carrier are both secured to the deck. The ship has taken on dust and grit from the nebula. Visibility in human spectrums is poor. Eye lenses compensating.’

  ‘Bodies?’ came the inquisitor’s crackling reply. We could barely hear her. The dust was murder to vox cohesion.

  ‘None. No bodies.’ I disengaged my magnetic seals and drifted ahead of the others, rising to the chamber’s girder-thick roof. To move, I dragged myself gently across the ceiling. A loose, unfired bolter shell clacked off my shoulder guard, slowly spinning away. ‘There’s nothing here, inquisitor. Nothing alive.’

  Her reply was stolen by static distortion.

  ‘Repeat, please,’ I said. ‘Interference.’

  Again, her words were abused by the struggling vox.

  ‘Justicar, I am losing contact with the Karabela.’

  +I’ve lost her, as well.+ I felt Galeo inside my head, a soft presence without the solidity to be intrusive. +It was to be expected.+

  +Inquisitor,+ I reached out to her.

  ‘I hear you.’ She sounded close enough to be standing next to me. Close enough to be sharing my suit of armour. With a momentary lurch of perception, I twisted in the air, locking my boots onto the ceiling. ‘Show me what you see,’ she said.

  Sharing my senses was one of our gifts that had always come easily to me. It took a fragment of concentration to open myself to what I was seeing – past the flickering target locks and scrolling runes of my retinal display. The angle of the chamber as I stood upon its ceiling; the revolving stars beyond the open bay doors; the debris drifting through the air, like the wreckage in a drowned city.

  Our Stormraven gunship was a bloated silver tick latched onto the hangar deck, its tongue unrolled into a gangramp. Malchadiel, the last of us, was descending it now. Sothis had drifted over to the Predator tanks in their ordered rows, and was brushing his hands over their bleached, deformed armour plating. Galeo stood by the open docking bay doors, staring out into space. Dumenidon had stomped across the platform towards a deactivated control panel, and was clearing floating crates aside to reach it.

  ‘I see,’ came Annika’s response. For a split second, I reached too far into the bond between us, and my vision doubled as I saw through her senses. She stood in the Karabela’s strategium, facing the occulus. Darford and Clovon were with her. The heretic was muttering something.

  My surge of irritation strained the psychic union, leaving my vision watery and indistinct. It took a moment to claw it back to stability, little different from staring into darkness and waiting for your eyes to adjust.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  +Nothing.+

  ‘Now I can hear you whispering something.’

  I was reciting the ninety-second litany of absolute focus. Rather than answer her, I turned to the reason I’d drifted up to the ceiling. Manoeuvring through the girders was no trial at all; no incidental contact would breach my armour. The inquisitor’s presence receded, leaving her a passive observer through my senses.

  Blood had frozen into a crystal crust along several of the dark iron beams. It flaked away under my touch, turning to red powder in the dusty air.

  +Kindred,+ Galeo sent. +Be ready to move on. Hyperion, what of the psychic distress call?+

  ‘It ceased the moment we set foot aboard,’ I voxed. ‘This feels like a very crude trap, justicar.’

  +Almost certainly. Stay alert.+

  I unlocked my boots and kicked off the ceiling, drifting through the debris. At the last moment, I turned and landed on the hangar deck, relocking my stabilisers.

  ‘No bodies.’ Malchadiel echoed what we all knew, and what we were all still thinking. ‘They have a gunship here, and never managed to reach it.’

  Through my psychic link to Annika, I heard Darford’s distant grumble. ‘This just gets better.’

  II

  An Adeptus Astartes warship is a bastion in the void, designed to break blockade fleets, rain bombardment upon the surface of a world, and face down warships many times its size. Many of the secrets in our fleet vessels’ exact design are lost to us, predating the Imperium, with their roots back in the Dark Age of Technology. Suffice to say, any Imperial Space Marine warship is a fortress in space, and its insides are a labyrinth of ornate architecture and grand chambers.

  We made our way from the modest hangar bay, consulting retinal schematics as we moved to the primary armoury. While a Hunter-class destroyer lacked the scale of its larger cousins, it wasn’t entirely devoid of majesty. Wolf-headed gargoyles leered from the walls, watching us with frosted faces and unblinking eyes. Door arches showed carvings of elaborate bronzeworking, which would be considered masterpieces on many worlds. Gold-leaf runes ran the lengths of whole corridor walls, while many of the chambers boasted entire floors encrusted with mosaic tiles. In the Gothic bowels of these warships, ostentation met practicality like nowhere else in mankind’s galaxy.

  We didn’t split up. We were Grey Knights, not a pack of idiotic salvagers. Each of us had been raised and trained to act as his brother’s shield, and we kept our minds faintly linked, ready to see through each other’s senses at a moment’s notice.

  The artificial pulse of Malchadiel’s auspex scanner was a clockwork heartbeat we couldn’t ignore. It tick, tick, ticked in contemplative rhythm, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, sensing nothing.

  We moved with our weapons high. As always, Galeo and Dumenidon led the way. I walked as rearguard, my storm bolter raised and my pistol in my other hand.

  The ship had suffered, there was no doubt. A serf or servitor team navigating through the wreckage would have required a great deal of doubling back on themselves to seek other passages. Any blockages we found, where wreckage barricaded the way, were cleared by Malchadiel and Galeo working in telekinetic unity. They hauled the mangled iron aside with pulls and bursts of kinetic force.

 
Malchadiel was breathing in low grunts over the vox by the time he wrenched aside the thirtieth pile of twisted iron. His primary gift was as a telekine, but the human body has limits, even one implanted with the Emperor’s Gift. Psychic ice hoarfrosted his armour, flaking away when he flexed his muscles to refocus.

  We found the first bodies in the primary armoury chamber. Servitors and Chapter serfs decorated the room in murdered profusion, hanging silent in the weightless air. Each corpse told of a foul death: the bodies were burst open, pulled apart, or cleaved clean in twain.

  The first corpse of note sat slumped against the wall, a ceramite-clad hand on its armoured stomach. He’d died while failing to restore the ropes of his intestines to his belly. Like us, he’d locked his boots to the deck. Unlike us, he was unarmed. A rune-inscribed bolter drifted just out of his reach.

  ‘Sova gudt, hell’ten,’ Annika murmured in my mind – a Fenrisian benediction for a hero to rest in peace. Unfamiliar with the Chapter’s inner workings, I didn’t recognise the company markings on his war plate: a riveted iron wolf staring from his shoulder, with wolf-tail talismans hanging from his belt. A pool of frozen blood spread in all directions from his corpse at its epicentre. Not all of the discoloured fluid was human.

  +Hyperion,+ Galeo prompted. I knew what he wished.

  ‘Aye, justicar.’

  I walked to the corpse, letting my fingers rest on his helm. The warrior’s hanging head left him staring down at what was left of his torso.

  +What do you see?+

  I saw as if through a veil of mist – the view from another’s eyes. This chamber, alive with running serfs and servitors armed with industrial tools… Lithe, daemonic figures ran between them, cleaving about them with serrated blades that looked to be forged of brass or bronze. The mist veil thickened, clearing again to show the warrior’s very last sight. One of the creatures – a thing of swollen, molten veins beneath cracked black skin – sprayed bile into my vision as it lanced its blade into my stomach. I heard nothing, felt nothing, but the sight left little to the imagination.

  I lifted my hand from his helm.

  ‘Children of the Sanguinary Unholiness, justicar. Dozens of them.’

  +Spread out,+ he ordered. +I want answers.+

  The primary armoury lay undefended but for the bodies of the slain, its great doors open to resemble toothless maws. The walls were barren racks, holding no sign of blades or bolters. Every weapon had been claimed. Since the death of gravity, crates of ammunition and spare chainsword teeth-tracks had spilled their contents into the air, punctuating the spaces between the floating corpses.

  The only light came from our weapons, blades softly gleaming with low-tuned power fields, occasionally sending shadows dancing along the walls as a crackle of electrical force rasped down a sword’s edge. The flickering play of silhouettes turned the broken, frozen faces into the trembling visages of daemons.

  ‘They depleted this place,’ Sothis said. ‘Not a weapon left.’

  I gestured to the ceiling, pitted and cracked to absolute ruination with bolter fire, as well as the impacts of smaller calibre weapons. ‘Something was above them in this chamber. They sought to bring it down.’

  Even our enhanced vision suffered in the dusty near-dark. My armour sensed my straining sight and switched my eye lenses to a different frequency, piercing some of the ashen distortion. Still nothing there.

  +We’re deep enough now. Hyperion, commence a sending.+

  I holstered my bolt pistol. ‘At once, justicar.’

  III

  There is a saying, drawn from the ages of Old Earth and written by a council of Ancient Merican kings, that all men were created equal. I’d often wondered if the words sounded as false and idealistic to those men’s ears as they did to mine. Truly, humanity has an infinite capacity for self-deception.

  Deceit is a sin against purity, as recorded in the fifteenth decree of piety. To lie is to stain the soul, and he who deceives himself is thrice-blackened by the falsehood.

  All men are not created equal. The proof is there for any eye to see.

  While we are no longer men in the human sense, we carry our origins within us, so no Knight is exactly equal, either.

  Sothis had no affinity to carry out a sending, nor did Dumenidon. Malchadiel’s abilities were primarily those of a telekine, while I was classified in the strictest terms as a pyrokine. But of the five souls in Castian, the responsibility for a sending always fell to Galeo or myself. They were almost always undertaken alone.

  How to describe a sending? How does one describe a storm to an underhive child who can’t imagine wind and weather? You can explain that rain is water against the face, and that the black clouds above are like a bank of pollutant fog, but the picture will always be incomplete. The child has never seen the sky. The only wind he has ever felt is the asthmatic breathing of ventilator exchangers.

  In my earliest nights, I’d needed to kneel to commit a sending – to chant scripture and focus on ignoring the sensations of my body. Thankfully, my training had brought me far from those first halting trials, and the bond with my brothers amplified my talents. On the Frostborn, I merely had to close my eyes.

  The ship resisted me. I could feel the taint in its bones, the spoiled iron and sour steel repelling my questing touch. Hall by hall, chamber by chamber, I unfolded my senses and drifted through the dead ship.

  To see without sight, to perceive without any physical sense, is disconcerting even for a prepared mind. I’d once performed a sending in a habitation block, and the assaulting feedback had been a siege against my senses: a hundred minds hammering their needs and thoughts back into my brain, all in one toxic flood. Beneath that maelstrom of sentience lingered the simple, sharp hind-brain instincts of the vermin breeding behind every wall, and the contours of the building itself – its angles, the porous holes in its materials, the way its weight leaned on its foundations…

  Sending my senses through the destroyer was poisonously kin to that experience. The baroque walls and narrow conduits pulsed with a secret heartbeat, alive in a way that no scanner would ever detect.

  Nowhere at all did I feel any closer to reaching the source of the psychic whine. Whatever had been weeping into the warp now shielded itself with tenacity and strength.

  ‘I sense no living souls on the ship,’ I told them.

  +Bodies?+

  I could feel them, and their spirits lingering nearby. Every time I passed a corpse, I’d catch a half-sentence of whispered last words, or a flash of fanged maws and jagged blades.

  ‘Hundreds, justicar. All cold. All dead. The hull is rotten through with taint. It occludes my sight, but there are no survivors. At least, none awake. Hibernation remains a possibility.’

  ‘Speak of the taint in the walls,’ said Dumenidon. ‘I feel no such presence. Is it possession?’

  I ghosted through the corridors, feeling the walls ripple in my wake, though the structure never shifted. They recoiled on a psychic level, as if by instinct.

  ‘Not possession. Just taint. Nothing more than the dullest malice, from lingering corruption in the ship’s bones.’

  +Engines?+ Galeo asked.

  I narrowed my senses, focusing the sending through the grand chambers of the enginarium deck. The arcane fusion reactor machinery that had once been the warship’s burning heart lay silent and still, decorated in frozen blood and drifting debris. The plasma in its pipes and core was similarly motionless, thick in its frozen state.

  ‘Cold, justicar. As cold and dead as the crew.’

  +Deactivated?+ he quested towards me, +or powered down through abandonment?+

  ‘Difficult for me to tell, justicar. Mal?’

  ‘I’ll go with him,’ Malchadiel replied.

  I drew his essence with me as I drifted back to the enginarium decks. Back in the chamber with our brothers, I heard his body stagger. He went to his knees, unable to focus on his physical form with his mind divided. But he knew his task, letting his senses roll
over the control consoles and the reactor’s surface.

  He spoke out loud, his voice distant and distracted. ‘The drive core in the primary enginarium chamber was manually terminated.’

  I could sense his movements as if I could see them, as his invisible reach trailed over rank upon rank of inert command consoles, visualising the network of machinery within each one.

  ‘All nine ignition ciphers have been removed.’ He hesitated then, and I listened to him breathe over the vox. ‘There’s carbon scoring in the sockets, and damage to the subdermal cables linking the consoles to the animus machinae. The ignition cipher keys were extracted while the ship was still in flight.’

  Sothis adjusted his weight. The murmur of his armour was a sudden distraction I had to compensate for. ‘They tried to kill the engines to drop from the warp,’ he said. ‘I do not understand. Why did they not eject their warp core? Was there no other way to return to real space?’

  Malchadiel fell forwards to his hands and knees, his senses still with me in the enginarium chambers. I was sweating now. Maintaining this level of focus forced my muscles to lock tight, and my temples ached from teeth that wouldn’t unclench.

  ‘Their Navigator,’ Malchadiel breathed. ‘It was their Navigator.’

  I felt his essence thinning, dispersing through the cobweb of cables and conduits that reached out from the drive rooms. His breathing grew ragged, and like a wolf scruffing a rival in its jaws, I pulled him back into himself.

  ‘That was unpleasant,’ he muttered, and managed to rise to his feet on the third attempt.

  ‘You were drifting,’ I told him.

  ‘My thanks for recalling me,’ he said.

  +What of their Navigator?+ Galeo prompted.

  ‘It was him,’ Malchadiel confirmed. My brother checked his weapons, as if to reassure himself they were still there. ‘They couldn’t break from the warp. They couldn’t even cripple the ship to stop it, by hurling their warp core into space. The Navigator wouldn’t let them. There’s a network of labyrinthine cables beneath the deck still aching to touch, stinging with the resonance from the Navigator’s spite. He wouldn’t even let them slow down.’