Once through, he skidded along a wide, open patch of buckling rockcrete. He had the vague impression of an enormous vaulted roof above him, zigzagged with growing cracks. The lack of air made everything strangely balletic – a choreographed dissolution in total silence.
Ahead of him was the gulf into the void. He saw the starfield beckoning, broken only by lines of spinning debris. He’d made it to the outer skin of the Undrider, beyond which there was nothing but empty space.
For a moment he thought he’d be carried straight out, shooting clear of the collapsing structure and somersaulting into vacuum.
He avoided that by a hand’s breadth. He shot his intact left hand out to catch the trailing edge of the landing gear as he sailed past it, grunting from the effort. His gauntlet closed over the metal strut, arresting his outward trajectory with a jerk. Once secured, he began to haul himself back up, struggling against the hurricane of flying wreckage.
He looked up, seeing a familiar grey cockpit looming over him. For all its bulk, it was already beginning to slide towards the void as the docking clamps holding it in place twisted and snapped.
Jorundur grimaced, and started to pull himself towards the entrance hatch.
‘No you don’t, you ugly bastard,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Not… yet…’
The plague-ship was dead and drifting, locked into a steadily accelerating tilt towards the planet below. The animating presence lurking at its heart was gone, and like a vast body suddenly bereft of its brainstem the whole vessel began to go haywire.
Ingvar ran hard, keeping Hafloí on his feet and trying not to lose ground with the rest of the pack. Together they tore through the warped labyrinth of the ship’s gruesome interior, going as swiftly as the cramped space and treacherous footing would allow. The route they’d taken to reach the bridge was closed to them – blocked by a furious, acidic inferno belching out of the ship’s tortured innards – and so they’d been forced to make their way down through the narrow capillaries of the destroyer’s crew decks.
It was hard to believe that the ship had once been designed by the hand of man. Once, many thousands of years ago, it would have been a creation of iron and adamantium, proudly bearing the insignias of the Imperial Navy on its golden prow and commanded by mortal officers bearing the sacred aquila on their breasts.
After millennia of corruption, little remained of that. Every surface had been warped and twisted, curled away from its original purpose and compelled into new, troublingly carnal forms. The narrow airways were thick with spores, and the spongy floors were clogged with filth. Every metal strut and beam was thick with oxidisation. The machinery, all of it ancient and arcane in its own right, had morphed into bizarre techno-biological hybrids, quivering with organesque appendages and glossy with cascades of dribbling fluid.
When it started to break open, it did so like a body. Blood coursed down from the sagging ceilings; pus pooled in the torn gaps between wall sections, oozing like infection across a scabrous hide.
‘No signal from the Undrider,’ reported Baldr, leaping over a dissolving patch of hissing floorspace. ‘Nothing at all.’
The plague-ship suddenly lurched hard, throwing them against the pulpy walls. The narrow tunnel started to shiver more violently.
‘Out of interest,’ asked Váltyr, struggling to keep his feet, ‘how close are we to re-entry?’
‘You had to ask,’ grunted Olgeir.
The pack pressed on, going as fast as the treacherous conditions permitted. With every step, the stench and filth intensified around them.
Eventually they burst out of the tunnels and into a larger domed chamber. It had been set into the side of the ship, and its exterior wall was entirely taken up by a multi-faceted window in the shape of a giant eye. The place might once have been a viewing gallery, built in an age when starships carried more than purely military crew.
Now it was a charnel house, a rotting canker of accumulated foulness. Death-bloated corpses hung from the roof on rusting hooks. Maggots carpeted the floor, wriggling across a sickening floorspace of mouldering cadavers. Bleached skulls protruded from the festering mass, barely visible under the clouds of flies that droned around them.
As they entered, the heaps of putrescence stirred. Bodies, clad in robes of mildewed sackcloth, twisted to meet the intruders. Their cowled faces were masked by obscenely long rebreathers, and their round eye-lenses glowed lime-green in the dark. Like the mutants they’d seen earlier they carried toxin weapons in their bony hands. Oblivious to the slow doom encompassing their ship, they limped towards the pack, chattering to one another in half-breathed, sibilant voices.
‘Slay them!’ thundered Gunnlaugur, kicking aside the heaps of decaying body-parts to get at them. ‘Slay them all!’
Olgeir’s bolter opened up again, sending severed limbs spinning and bouncing across the chamber.
Ingvar didn’t follow the order. Dozens of the creatures had already risen; many more were stirring. There would be hundreds before long, drawn from every stinking hole and pit in the ship by the sounds of battle.
They were running out of time. Soon the ship would begin to roll into the planet’s atmosphere and the whole structure would burn. Gunnlaugur would never admit it, but they’d left it too late to reach the Caestus. They’d still be fighting their way towards it when the first flames began to lick along the destroyer’s hull.
Hafloí struggled to free himself from Ingvar’s grip. Though still spore-blind and bleeding, he wanted to fight. Ingvar didn’t let him go.
‘Bastard,’ Hafloí slurred groggily.
Ingvar ran another sweep via his helm-mounted sensors, searching for some sign that the Undrider had survived.
He got nothing: the frigate was gone. Ingvar felt his heart sink. Gunnlaugur’s gambit had been too risky; they should have withdrawn when they’d had the chance.
He was about to give up, to return to the fight, when something suddenly registered. He picked up a signal in the void, moving fast, closing on their position.
The way it flew was familiar. Ingvar smiled.
‘Brothers!’ he roared, dragging Hafloí over to the huge window. ‘We have to leave! We have to leave now!’
They didn’t listen. They couldn’t listen: they were already hard-pressed by hordes of grave-mutants. The whole chamber crawled with them – snaking down from the meathooks, burrowing up from the butcher’s piles, shuffling into the chamber from corridor orifices.
Ingvar turned to Hafloí, and activated dausvjer’s disruptor.
‘Hold your breath, whelp,’ he said. ‘This is going to hurt.’
He lashed out with the blade, shattering the window. The sword’s energy field exploded and the iron frame cracked outwards. Foul air exploded through the breach, wrenching the rest of the window free and blowing the contents of the charnel chamber out into the void.
Ingvar was ripped out first, shooting clear of the destroyer’s hull in a tumbling rain of crystal and iron. He kept a tight grip on Hafloí’s cracked helm, squeezing it tight in his gauntlet and trying to stem air-loss.
A messy spume of spinning bones and cadaverous flesh shot out after them. Among the spreading fog of decay tumbled the grave-mutants, clutching wildly at nothing and gasping for air through their useless masks. The armour-sealed Space Marines came along with them, protected from the shock of exit and oxygen loss though powerless to halt their ejection.
‘What in Hel?’ demanded Gunnlaugur over the comm, sounding choked with rage as he rolled clumsily through space. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Look up,’ replied Ingvar calmly.
Vuokho swooped in close, manoeuvring expertly on its retros as beams of las-fire flickered around it. It hovered over the expanding cloud of falling bodies, swivelling on its axis and opening the frontal crew-bay doors.
‘Six of you,’ came Jorundur’s sour voice on th
e pack-wide comm, dripping with irritation. ‘This could take a while. For Russ’s sake, try not to thrash about.’
The two vessel-corpses carved their way into Ras Shakeh’s upper atmosphere, lighting up in vivid trails of flame.
One was the Undrider, barely more than a semi-coherent collection of melting metal plates.
The other was the plague-ship. Its core integrity remained intact until the full force of re-entry hit. Its swollen underside began to glow rust-red, then orange, then eye-watering white. It exploded shortly after that, spreading a network of burning debris across the skies of the planet below.
Gunnlaugur watched both ships burn from the sanctuary of Vuokho’s cockpit. Since being recovered, his mood had blackened. He’d always found it difficult to come down from the fearsome endorphin-high of combat. This time, though, it was doubly hard. Jorundur had sensed it, and for once attempted no acerbic comment. They sat together in silence, watching the wreckage below them twist and blaze.
All across the control console, Vuokho’s machine-spirit sent them angry warnings of imminent systems failure. The gunship had taken a lot of damage from the enemy’s close gunners. Just making planetfall would be an achievement.
The whole pack was subdued. Hafloí had nearly died. Váltyr shared Gunnlaugur’s anger with Ingvar, convinced that they could have fought their way to the Caestus before it was too late to launch. Baldr and Olgeir had said nothing about it, though even Heavy-hand had found little to smile about after his recovery.
It had been victory, of a sort. They were alive, the enemy was dead. Somehow, given the carnage, given how close it had been, it was hard to see things that way.
He overruled me.
Gunnlaugur suppressed the thought, knowing where it would lead. Dealing with Ingvar would have to wait
He turned to Jorundur. The two of them were alone, sitting side by side; the others had remained in the crew compartment below.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me. What was that?’
‘Only guesses, vaerangi,’ said Jorundur.
‘Any signal from the planet?’
‘Still silent.’
Gunnlaugur looked down at the Thunderhawk’s scrolling auspex readings. He saw patterns of conurbations down on the surface – sprawls of industrial cities, web-like traceries of roads, the puckered mass of mountain ranges. Some of it was burning; trails of black smoke stained the atmosphere across a whole band of urbanised terrain.
‘No orbital defences,’ he said. ‘One ship couldn’t have taken them down. There must have been others.’
Jorundur looked sceptical. ‘Then why aren’t they still here?’
‘They did what they came for – landed forces, then moved on. We saw empty depots on the destroyer. It stayed behind. A sentry, perhaps, overlooking the planetary assault.’
Jorundur nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps.’
Gunnlaugur scrutinised the auspex feeds. Their resolution wasn’t enough to make out much detail, but the damage on the surface was hard to miss.
‘There’s fighting down there,’ he said. ‘Movement. I can see it. If we’re getting no readings, then they’re being jammed.’
‘We have to land,’ said Jorundur. ‘We’re losing power. Soon we’ll lose our hull. Here are the drop coordinates we were given.’
Gunnlaugur watched as the picters scanned across to them. He saw a blurry urban splash of pale grey against red earth. He saw two concentric walls, and what looked like massive defensive installations arranged in terraced rows. There was no burning around those walls; the nearest sign of destruction was hundreds of kilometres to the south-west.
‘Looks undamaged,’ he said. ‘Take us down. Broadcast encrypted landing clearance on the secure comm. I’ll get Olgeir up here to man the guns – we might need him.’
Jorundur started to move the heavy control columns, and the gunship’s battered muzzle dipped towards the world’s curve.
‘What are you expecting?’ he asked, trying to lighten the oppressive atmosphere.
‘I don’t know,’ said Gunnlaugur, sinking back into his seat and falling silent. ‘I really don’t know.’
II
The Wounded Heart
Chapter Nine
Sister Uwe Bajola rose before sunrise, as she always did, and went to the west-facing wall of her cell, as she always did.
In the hour of deep-red shadows, before the full day’s heat properly arrived, her mind was clear and her body was calm. Routine calmed it further. She had always appreciated the familiar rhythms, the mechanical purity of repetition. In times of trial they had a particular value.
She opened the gahlwood door and padded out onto the balcony. She took a deep breath. The air was already warming. It tasted of sand.
Bajola leaned on the balcony and felt the last of the night’s breeze press against the cotton of her shift. That was pleasant, for the short while it lasted. Though raised on a world of unrelenting sun, her melanin-rich skin as black as her battle-armour, she had never quite come to terms with Ras Shakeh’s climate. Something about the sunlight was wrong. It burned, but did not warm; it dazzled, but did not illuminate.
She bowed her head, running a hand absently over her cropped hair. Such thoughts, such ingratitude, were unworthy.
Cleanse my soul, she mouthed, reciting the words in her head, remembering how they’d looked on the parchment when she’d first learned them.
Cleanse my soul;
Clear my mind;
Enable my body.
Grant that my station may serve;
Grant that my strength may suffice;
Grant that my life may give honour;
Grant that my death may earn it.
They were beautiful words. They comforted her; they always had. She closed her eyes for a moment, enjoying the quiet of the pre-dawn. In the distance she heard the erh-erh of klohawks. The scents of the city rose to meet her: gently warming rockcrete, dried spices, burning oil, gahl trees turning their speared leaves to face the rising sun.
Only in the hour before dawn was the city of Hjec Aleja restful. As the flaming orange sunrise tipped over the western horizon, the manufactories would start up again, the dust-crawlers would begin to move, the garrisons would empty and refill as the watches were cycled.
Until then, she could watch the place sleeping, cooled by the long night, the toils and strains and nightmares subdued for a while, if not forgotten.
Her balcony was high up, near the summit of the Third Spire of the Cathedral of Blessed Alexia, so she could see a long way. Her deep brown eyes ran over the cityscape as it unfolded below her.
She saw tight-packed streets with tiled roofs, arranged in a haphazard maze of overhanging eaves. No thoroughfare in Hjec Aleja ever ran straight. When she’d first arrived she’d assumed that was an accident. Only later had she discovered the myriad superstitions of the planet. A straight road let in mirage-spirits, she had been told. Keep the way crooked, and they can’t find the thresholds.
Stupid beliefs they were, probably heretical, but tolerated for so long that opposing them had long ago been abandoned. Bajola knew that de Chatelaine would have loved nothing more than to purge the world of its theological untidiness – it was a shrineworld, after all – but even she had to bend when faced with something ground so deep, so, impervious, like the endless red dust that you could never scrub from your fingernails or keep from caking on your lips.
Besides, the people of Ras Shakeh worshipped the Emperor fervently enough. They could be forgiven their eccentricities, which even the canoness allowed were harmless.
In any case, now that the horror had arrived, such things had ceased to be important. Bajola screwed her eyes up, gazing into the rusty haze of the horizon, wondering when that empty land would first fill with the cloud-blight of marching soldiers.
Soon. All the strategeos told them that, s
haking their heads as they looked into their tactical projections. Progress had been astonishing since the landings: unreasonably fast, unreasonably brutal.
When she had been younger, newly inducted into the Orders Famulous and sent out into the void on her first diplomatic missions, Bajola had been troubled by what she saw of the arch-enemy’s work. Why, she had wondered, did the Emperor, the omnipotent Master of Mankind, permit such terror to exist in the universe? He must have been capable of destroying it, just as he had once destroyed the heresy of his greatest son.
The error of that thinking had led to castigation fairly swiftly. Canoness Reich, her first superior in the Order, had been unequivocal.
‘What do you want, child?’ she had demanded, fixing her with those biting, ice-blue eyes. ‘A life of comfort? What d’you think would become of us then?’
She’d leaned over to Bajola, jabbing her in the chest with her bronze augmetic finger.
‘We’d become fat. We’d become corrupt. Conflict keeps us lean, fit, pure, the way we were meant to be.’
Bajola had been more easily cowed then. Reich had been a formidable woman.
‘He orders the universe as it should be. Welcome the test, child. Welcome the knowledge that the void harbours terror. Without terror, there are no heroes.’
It had been easy to say, and easy to believe. Now, watching the sun rise over a doomed world, waiting for the ranks of terror to close on the last city, the aphorism felt hollow.
Bajola was not so easily cowed now. She was capable of making her own mind up.
Grant that my life may give honour;
Grant that my death may earn it.
A first sliver of gold broke over the distant ridge of the Djarl peaks. Almost immediately the air began to feel hotter.
She could have stayed there for a long time, gathering her thoughts before the day’s labours began. When her comm-bead disturbed her, buzzing into life as she watched the first amber rays of sunlight angle through the mountains, it was an irritation.
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