‘Thank you, mistress.’
‘Not you.’
The hunched fellow seemed to muse on this for a moment. ‘Oh.’
A muffled weeping in the distance stole any further comment. Human emotion, helplessness without a shred of malice. A girl. The sound carried strangely down the hallway, resonating against the metal walls.
Octavia felt her skin prickling. She stared down the corridor, peering into the darkness that her hand-held lamp pack could only barely pierce. The beam of light lanced left and right, stabbing the gloom with weak illumination. Bare metal walls met her questing, until the light could reach no further down the long hallway.
‘Not again,’ she whispered, before calling out a hesitant greeting. No answer.
‘Hello?’ she tried again.
The girl’s weeping stopped, fading away as Octavia’s voice echoed.
‘Hello, mistress.’
‘Shut up, you.’
‘Yes, mistress.’
She swallowed, and her throat clicked softly. There were no children on the ship. Not any more. Octavia reached for her hand vox, and almost thumbed the Send rune. But what was the point? Septimus wasn’t on the ship. He’d been gone for almost two months now, leaving her alone.
Octavia clicked her fingers at her... servant? Attendant? Thing.
He turned blind eyes up to her. How he managed to stare adoringly when his eyes were sewn shut was quite beyond her.
‘Come on,’ she said.
‘Yes, mistress.’
‘You heard that, right? The girl?’
‘No, mistress.’
She led him on, leaving her chamber far behind. As they walked, he picked at the dirty bandages wrapping his hands, but said nothing more. Occasionally, a sound from deeper in the ship would carry through the hull’s bones. The clanging of a machinist’s tools or the clank of bootsteps several decks up. Occasionally, she heard muttered voices, sibilant in their murderer’s tongue. She was struggling to learn even the basics of Nostraman since her capture. To listen to it, it sounded both seductive and mellifluous. To learn it was another matter. At its core, Nostraman was a nightmare of complex words and jumbled phrasing, scarcely related to Gothic at all. She suspected that despite Septimus’s pleasant praise, she was mispronouncing everything, and she was fairly certain the vocabulary she’d mastered so far wasn’t something even a particularly dim infant would be proud of.
They moved on through the gloom, nearing the passageway’s end. In the darkness ahead, where the corridor branched into a junction, a figure dashed from one hallway to the next. It ran right across her path – too slight and small to be an adult, too tiny to be even a ruined thing like her attendant. A blur of blue clothing met her stare before the figure was gone. Octavia listened to its gentle, rapid footfalls running down the other corridor.
Again, she heard the childish weeping – the soft mewling of a child trying to keep her pain hidden.
‘Hello?’
‘Ashilla sorsollun, ashilla uthullun,’ the little girl called back to her, as the sound of fleeing footsteps faded.
‘I think I’m going back to my chamber,’ Octavia said softly.
II
GANGES STATION
A sliver of midnight drifted on dead engines, betraying nothing of its presence.
A world turned in the emptiness, its cloudless face one of grey stone and lifeless continents. Even an untrained eye needed only to glance at the rock to see its potential, not to nurture life, but to feed an industrious species with its precious ore.
The only evidence of human existence hung in orbit: a vast platform of gunmetal grey, its empty docking arms reaching into the void. Along the station’s hull, stencilled in Imperial Gothic lettering, was the word GANGES.
The sliver of darkness drifted ever closer, as blind to astral scanners as it was to the naked eye. Within its blade-like body, a machine began to shriek.
Maruc crashed down onto the couch, wanting nothing more than to stop moving. For a few moments, that was more than enough. He couldn’t even be bothered to kick his boots off. Sixteen-hour shifts weren’t the worst of his compulsory labour duties, but they were damn close. He drew in a breath that hurt his ribs, getting a lungful of his habitation pod’s stuffy air. He smelled food cartons that needed throwing out days ago, and the ever-present suggestion of unwashed socks.
Home sweet home.
By the time the sigh finished leaving his lips, he was already thumbing at his closed eyes, trying to massage away some of the sting from staring at clanking conveyor belts all day. The earache, he couldn’t do anything about. That had to stay.
With an exaggerated groan, he rolled to reach for the remote control palette where it lay in pieces on the floor. A few clicks later and he’d reattached the battery pack. He repeatedly speared the loose ON button with his fingertip, knowing it’d pick up on his intent at some point. For a wonder, it only took a few seconds this time. The screen mounted on the opposite wall flickered to life.
Well. Sort of.
It showed the kind of jagged distortion that spoke of something much worse than a mistuning. A technical fault, maybe. No picture, no sound, no nothing. Not that Ganges’s endless cycle of Ecclesiarchial sermons, obituaries and technical safety broadcasts were exciting, but they beat seeing nothing but static.
He tapped the volume gauge. Silence became the dead-voiced whispery hiss of interference, even at full volume. Wonderful. No, really. Just great. Like he had the credits spare to call out the technical servitors again? Beautiful.
He let the remote fall from his oil-stained fingers, where it promptly ended up bisected on the floor, missing its battery pack again. He then said ‘Balls to this’ out loud to the empty habitation chamber, decided he was too tired to bother unfolding the couch into its bed position, and worked on sleeping off yet another pointless day in an increasingly pointless life.
Was he proud? No. But ‘just’ seven more years of this, and he’d have enough saved to drag himself off Ganges for good, catching a shuttle to somewhere else – somewhere with prospects slightly less grim. He’d have signed up for the Imperial Guard long ago if his eyes could see worth a damn. But they couldn’t, so he hadn’t.
Instead, he worked the construction belts here, sighing his way through a job deemed too menial to bother programming a servitor for.
Maruc drifted into sleep with these thoughts at the forefront of his aching head. It wasn’t a restful sleep, but that didn’t matter because it didn’t last long anyway.
The screen started shrieking.
Maruc jerked back from the border of sleep with a series of curse words, grabbing at the remote and slapping the battery pack back into place. He dulled the volume while his free hand checked his ears to make sure they weren’t bleeding.
They weren’t. He was almost surprised.
A glance at the digital chron on his wall showed he’d been asleep, or almost there, for less than five minutes. Sound had evidently returned to the monitor, though it didn’t sound like any distortion he’d heard before. This unit had given him a fair share of technical issues. His screen had crackled, buzzed, popped and hissed before. It had never shrieked.
Bleary-eyed, with a pounding headache, he raised the volume again. The sound grew louder, but no clearer. A tortured machine whine, pitched painfully high. A hundred human voices, formless and tuneless, rendered inhuman as they drowned in static. It was both, and neither.
The lights flickered above. Another power cut coming. Ganges was a run-down backwater at the best of times, stuck in orbit around a dead world at the arse end of nowhere. Last time the lights died, they’d been out for three day cycles before the tech crews had the illumination generators breathing again. Work hadn’t ceased, of course. Not with the production schedules each sector had to meet. The entire western district of the station spent seventy hours working by torchlight. Dozens of menials had lost limbs or fingers in the machinery, and that week’s obituaries ran as long as a saints’ day prayer scroll.
Maruc hauled himself off the couch just as the lights went out. Fumbling in the dark brought him to the wall, and he opened the emergency supply cabinet containing his lamp pack, with a batch of standard-issue battery packs that would serve in every one of the hab-room’s scarce and simple appliances. He was always lax in charging them, so which ones were still live remained a mystery for now. He stuffed all eight of the palm-sized discs into his overall pockets, operating under the shaky light of his hand-held torch, then crashed back onto the couch to await the inevitable personnel announcement that would demand they all ‘Behave as normal’, and that ‘Illumination shall be restored at the earliest possible juncture’.
Throne. What a hole.
Two minutes went by, and became five. Five became ten. Every once in a while, Maruc would click on his lamp pack and aim the torch’s beam at his wall chron, frowning at the passing of time.
At last, the chime sounded from the vox speaker mounted above the door. Instead of the automated message he’d been expecting, the stationwide vox system gave the same screaming whine as his screen, only twice as loud. His hands slammed to his ears, as if fingers and dirty palms could block over a hundred decibels of skull-aching shrieking. Maruc hammered the door release with his elbow, spilling out into the communal hallway on his knees. The sound followed him, crying from the deck speakers out there as well. Other doors slid open, but that only amplified the sound: the scream leapt from individual hab-rooms as other personnel staggered from their own chambers.
What the hell is going on?
He yelled the words, but never heard them leave his throat, nor did anyone nearby respond.
Arella had been telling a story about her cat when everything went to hell. It hadn’t been a particularly funny story, or an interesting one, but up on the overseer deck anything that passed the time was considered a welcome distraction. Their work shifts almost always consisted of twelve-hour stints spent watching scanner screens that showed nothing, reading crew reports that never looked any different from previous days, and discussing what they’d all do once they were transferred off this derelict munitions station, hopefully rotated back to actual fleet service.
Today, something had happened, and the crew on shift weren’t exactly thrilled. Their chief officer, Arella Kor, was especially ardent in wishing things had just stayed quiet.
The weapons array was active, defensive turrets staring out into the void. The shields were live, layered spheres of invisible force protecting the station’s hideous hull. Arella’s eyes strayed to the timer on her console. Seven minutes and forty-one seconds had passed since the interference began. She was calling it ‘interference’ because that sounded a lot less worrying than ‘the damn screaming’.
Currently, the damn scr– the interference was being broadcast through their internal vox-net, screeched onto every deck at an insane volume. They couldn’t shut it down, and no one knew why.
‘The lights have just died in Western-Two,’ one of the others called out. ‘Oh, shit... and Western-One. And Western-Three. And all of the Eastern sector. And–’
Fittingly, the lights died on the command deck at that same moment. Reserve generators cycled up, bathing them all in the headache red of emergency lighting.
‘It’s an external signal.’ The officer at the console next to her tapped his screen – one of the few on the station that still seemed to be functioning. ‘Whatever it is, it’s coming from out there.’
Arella blew a lock of hair off her face. The command deck was always too hot, the air filtration had never worked right, and stress wasn’t helping. ‘Details?’ She wiped her sweaty forehead on her sleeve.
The officer stabbed his screen with a fingertip again. ‘A sourceless transmission, ten minutes ago. It’s here, logged in the archive. When the signal was processed by our cogitators to be recorded and filed, it... spread. Like a disease, almost. It flooded specific station systems: the communications array, and the more primitive parts of the power grid.’
Arella sucked on her bottom lip, biting back the need to swear. ‘Gravity?’
‘Uncompromised.’
‘Shields?’
‘Still up.’
‘Atmosphere. Life support. Weapons.’
‘All still live. It’s a simple, brutal, randomised blurt of scrap-code. It can’t shut down anything complex. It’s just communications, auspex and... it looks like the illumination network is offline. Only the most basic systems, but they’re all filled with invasive code, impeding function.’
She looked back at her own scanner screen, at the same wash of corrupted feedback she’d been seeing for the last ten minutes. ‘Scanners, lights and vox. We’re blind, deaf and mute. And you know we’ll get kicked in the teeth for this. The clankers will have demerits splashed all over our records. Just watch.’ As if it would make any difference, she absently buttoned up her uniform jacket for the first time in countless shifts.
‘You’re not worried that this might be an attack?’ the other officer asked.
Arella shook her head. ‘Our weapons and shields still work. Nothing to worry about, except who the Mechanicus will hold accountable. And that’ll be us. Pissing clankers and their profit margins.’
Only a few years ago, she’d have worried about all the people forced to work in the dark. Now her first fear was for herself: the Adeptus Mechanicus wouldn’t take kindly to significant production delays, and this was going wrong in a hundred ways already. She might never get off Ganges at this rate.
The officer next to her, Sylus, scratched at his unshaven jawline. ‘So we get jammed and fall off critical productivity. How is that our fault?’
Arella struggled to keep her patience. Sylus was new to the station, only two months into his tenure, and he hadn’t mingled well. The bionics replacing his left cheek, temple and eye were ludicrously expensive – clearly he was a rich man playing at being a grunt. Maybe his wealthy father sent him here as some kind of punishment, or he was an Adeptus Mechanicus mole snooping for screw-ups. Whatever the truth, he was a stubborn bastard when he wanted to be.
She snorted. ‘Who do you think the clankers will blame? “Pirates jammed us” isn’t going to fly. Hell, why would anyone target a place like this? If whoever is out there could even get past our weapons, there’s nothing here worth taking.’
Sylus was no longer listening. Arella rose from her seat, mouth hanging open, staring out the command deck window at a ship that shouldn’t exist.
The Covenant of Blood was born in an age when humanity did more than reach for the stars – mankind sought to conquer them. Great shipyards had ringed the planets of the Sol System, as the Emperor led the species back into the galaxy on a crusade to unite every world of worth within His aegis.
The vessels brought about in that era sailed the stars ten thousand years ago, before rediscovered Standard Template Constructs homogenised the technology of the entire human race. Innovation was not considered a sin. Deviation in the name of progress was visionary, not blasphemy. Like many of the warships born in those first fleets, the Covenant’s design was initially based on fragments of STC technology, but not limited to it. When it sailed under full power, it tore through space as a sleek hunter, owing as much to the contours of ancient Crusade-era warships as it did to the blocky structure of an Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser.
The Exalted’s affection for its vessel went far beyond pride. It was a haven, the creature’s sanctuary from a galaxy that desired its destruction, and the Covenant was the weapon it wielded in the Long War.
On its command throne, the creature licked its jaws, watching the image of Ganges Station expand in the occulus. They’d ghosted this close, undetected by the station’s instruments or weapons batteries, but as they neared the invisible edge of the Ganges’s void shields, they were close enough to be seen by the naked eye.
‘Closer, closer,’ the Exalted drawled to its bridge crew. ‘Maintain the Shriek.’
Arella’s monitor still showed
a confused storm of data; flickering after-images, information screeds and signals tracked that simply couldn’t be there. One moment it registered fifty-three ships almost on top of each other. The next, nothing but empty space.
Outside the view window, the ship drifted closer. Armour plating – layers of black, bronze, cobalt and midnight – reflected the gaze of distant stars.
‘It looks like an Errant strike cruiser,’ she said. ‘A big one.’ She chewed on her bottom lip, unable to take her eyes from the ship drifting closer. ‘The Marines Errant aren’t due for resource collection until the end of the production cycle, nine and a half months from now.’
‘It’s not the Marines Errant,’ Sylus replied. ‘Not their colours, nor their symbol.’
‘So who the hell are they?’
Sylus laughed, the sound soft and low. ‘How am I supposed to know?’
Arella sat back down, breathing through her teeth. ‘Why aren’t we firing?’ She felt the rise in her voice, perilously close to a whine. ‘We have to fire.’
‘At Imperial Space Marines?’ One of the others looked appalled. ‘Are you insane?’
‘They’re in our space with no clearance, are making no attempts to hail us, and are jamming all our sensors to worthlessness? Coming in on a docking drift with a Mechanicus outpost, full of resources to be shared with the Marines Errant Chapter? Yes, we should be defending ourselves.’ She swore again. ‘We have to fire, somehow.’
‘With no target lock?’ Sylus was resisting panic with much better grace. If anything, he looked almost bored, working his console and retuning dials with a safecracker’s patience.
‘Get Station Defence to fire their guns manually!’
Sylus scowled now, trying to listen to his earpiece. ‘Internal vox is down. What do you want me to do, Arella? Shout down the corridor and hope the whole station hears? They’re blind down there, anyway. Illumination is dead. How will they get to the turret platforms?’
She clenched her teeth, watching the warship drift closer. Almost three thousand people were on board Ganges, and they had the firepower to stave off an entire pirate fleet. Now, a single enemy ship was aiming for their heart, and the only people that knew couldn’t say a damn thing to the people that could actually do something about it.
Night Lords Omnibus Page 39