‘Disengage all umbilicals from the station.’
‘Underway, my lord.’ The mortal bridge attendant – was it Dallow? Dathow? Such insignificant details struggled to remain in the Exalted’s mind – bent over his console, his former Imperial Navy uniform devoid of all allegiance markings. The man hadn’t shaved in several days. His jawline was decorated with greying stubble.
Dallon, Vandred’s voice ghosted through the creature’s mind.
‘All systems to full power. Bring us about immediately.’
‘Aye, lord.’
The creature extended its senses, letting its hearing and sight bond with the Covenant’s far-reaching auspex sensors. There, burning in the deep void, the warm coals of enemy engine cores. The Exalted leaned into the sensation, wrapping its sightless vision around the approaching presences – a blind man counting the stones in his hand.
Three. Three smaller vessels. A frigate patrol.
The Exalted opened its eyes. ‘Status report.’
‘All systems, aye.’ Dallon was still working his console as the Master of Auspex called out from his scanner table. ‘Three ships inbound, my lord. Nova-class frigates.’
On the occulus screen, the view resolved into the form of three Adeptus Astartes vessels, cutting the night as they speared closer. Even at their speed, it would take over twenty minutes for them to reach weapon range. More than enough time to disengage and run.
Nova-class. Ship-killers. These carried weapons for void-duelling, rather than Imperial Space Marines for close-range boarding actions.
All faces turned to the Exalted – all except the servitors slaved to the ship’s systems, who mumbled and drooled and cogitated, blind to anything outside their programming. The human crew watched expectantly, awaiting further orders.
It knew what they expected. It knew with sudden clarity that every human in the oval chamber expected the Exalted to order another retreat. To flee made perfect sense; the Covenant was still a shadow of its former might, limping from the scars earned during the brutality at Crythe.
The Exalted licked its maw with a black tongue. Three frigates. At optimal strength, the Covenant would drive through them like a spear, shattering all three with contemptuous ease. Perhaps, if the fates allowed it, the Covenant could still...
No.
The Covenant was close to complete ruin. Its ammunition loaders were empty, its plasma drives starved. They’d not used the Shriek on an amused whim – the Exalted ordered Deltrian to fashion it from necessity, along with the prophet’s human slave serving on the station as a traitor on the inside. Attacking Ganges through conventional means had never been a viable possibility. Nor was surviving this fight, even against such insignificant prey.
Yet for a moment, the temptation was agonisingly strong. Could they win this? The Exalted let its consciousness dissipate through the vessel’s iron bones. The plunder leeched from Ganges was still mostly in the ship’s holds, not yet processed into usable compounds. All the raw material in the galaxy wouldn’t help for a second.
Then the time for baring blades and showing fangs would come soon. Now was the time to be ruled by reason, not rage. The Exalted clenched its teeth, forcing calm into its words.
‘Come abeam of Ganges. All starboard broadsides to fire at will. If we cannot finish stripping our prize, then no one will.’
The ship shivered as it began to obey. The Exalted turned its horned head to its bridge attendant. ‘Dallon. Ready for translation into the warp. Once Ganges is in pieces, we run.’
Again.
‘As you command, lord.’
‘Open a link to the Navigator,’ the Exalted growled. ‘Let us get this over with.’
She sprinted through the darkness, led by memory and the dull lance of illumination from her lamp pack. Her footsteps rang out down the metal corridors, echoing enough to become the panicked sound of a horde of fleeing people. Behind, she heard her attendant struggling to keep up.
‘Mistress!’ he called again. His wails were receding as she outpaced him.
She didn’t slow down. The deck thrummed beneath her pounding feet. Power. Life. The Covenant was moving again, after days of sitting dead in dock.
‘Get back to your chambers,’ the Exalted’s voice had drawled, irritation utterly unmasked. Even if the creature could threaten her, it didn’t need to. She wanted this. She ached to sail again, and desire moved her limbs more than any devotion to duty.
She’d argued even as she obeyed. ‘I thought the Marines Errant weren’t due here for months.’
Before severing the link, the Exalted had grunted its disapproval. ‘Evidently, destiny has a sense of humour.’
Octavia ran on.
Her quarters were nowhere near Blackmarket. Octavia scattered her attendants as she finally reached her chamber after almost ten minutes of running down stairs, along decking, and simply leaping down the smaller stairwells.
‘Mistress, mistress, mistress,’ they greeted her in an irritating chorus. Breathless and aching, she staggered past them, crashing down onto her interface throne. Responding to her presence, the wall of screens came to life before her. Picters and imagifiers mounted on the ship’s hull opened their irises as one, staring out into the void from a hundred angles. As she caught her breath, she saw space, and space, and space – no different from the days before, as they’d sat here in the middle of nowhere, docked and half-crippled by damage. Only now, the stars moved. She smiled as she watched them starting their slow dance.
On a dozen screens, the stars meandered to the left. On a dozen others, they sailed right, or coasted down, or rose up. She leaned back into the throne of black iron and took a breath. The Covenant was coming about. Ganges hove into view, an ugly palace of black and grey. She felt the ship shiver as its weapons screamed. Despite herself, she smiled again. Throne, this ship was majestic when it chose to be.
Her attendants closed in around her, bandaged hands and dirty fingers holding interface cables and restraint straps.
‘Piss off,’ she told them, and snatched off her bandana. That sent them scattering.
I’m here, she said silently. I’m back.
From within her own mind, a presence that had lingered as a tiny, dense core of unrest began to unfold. It spread, great sheets of discordant emotion unwrapping to blanket her thoughts. It was a struggle to keep herself separate from the invader’s passions.
You, the presence whispered. The recognition was laced with disgust, but it was a faint and distant thing.
Her heart was a thudding drum now. Not fear, she told herself. Anticipation. Anticipation, excitement, and... well, alright, fear. But the throne was all the interface she needed. Octavia refused the crude implantation of psy-feed cables, let alone needing restraints. Those were the crutches for the laziest Navigators, and while her bloodline might not be worth much in terms of breeding, she felt this ship well enough to reject the interface aids.
Not me. Us. Her inner voice tingled with savage joy.
Cold. Weary. Slow. The voice was the low rumble of something tectonic. I awaken. But I am frozen by the void. I thirst and hunger.
She wasn’t sure what to say. It was strange to hear the ship address her with such tolerance, even if it was patience brought on by exhaustion.
It sensed her surprise through the resonant throne. Soon, my heart will burn. Soon, we will dive through space and unspace. Soon, you will shriek and shed salt water. I remember, Navigator. I remember your fear of the endless dark, far from the Beacon of Pain.
She refused to rise to its primitive baiting. The machine-spirit at the ship’s heart was a vicious, tormented thing, and at best – at its absolute least unpleasant – it still loathed her. Much more often, it was a siege just to unify her thoughts with the vessel at all.
You are blind without me, she said. When will you tire of this war between us?
You are crippled without me, it countered. When will you tire of believing you dominate our accord?
She.
.. she hadn’t thought about it like that. Her hesitation must’ve flowed down the link, because she felt the ship’s black heart beat faster, and another tremor ghosted through the Covenant’s bones. Runes flickered on several of her screens, all in Nostraman script. She knew enough to recognise an update of increased power capacity in the plasma generator. Septimus had taught her the Nostraman alphabet and pictographic signals pertaining to the ship’s function. ‘The essentials’, he’d called it, as if she were a particularly dim child.
A coincidence, then? Just the engines building up energy, rather than her thoughts triggering the shipwide shiver?
I grow warm, the Covenant told her. We hunt soon.
No. We run.
Somehow, it sighed within her mind. At least, that was how her human awareness interpreted the breathless pulse of inhuman frustration that slid behind her eyes.
Still uneasy from the ship’s accusation, she kept her thoughts back, holding them inside her skull, boxed away from the machine-spirit’s reach. In silence, she watched Ganges burn, waiting for the order to guide the ship through a wound in reality.
The warp engines came alive with a dragon’s roar, echoing in two realms at once.
‘Where?’ Octavia spoke aloud, her voice a wet whisper.
‘Make for the Maelstrom,’ came the Exalted’s reply, guttural over the vox. ‘We cannot linger in Imperial space any longer.’
‘I don’t know how to reach it.’
Oh, but she did. Couldn’t she feel it – a bloated, overripe migraine that hurt her head with each beat of her heart? Couldn’t she sense it with the same ease as a blind woman feeling the sunrise on her face?
She didn’t know the way there through the warp, that was true. She’d never sailed through a tempest to reach a hurricane’s heart. But she could sense it, and she knew that was enough to reach it.
The Maelstrom. The Covenant heard her torment and responded itself. Waves of sickening familiarity washed over the Navigator as it felt the ship’s primitive memory through the bond they shared. Her skin prickled and she needed to spit. The vessel’s dull recollection became her own: a memory of the void boiling with cancerous ghosts, of tainted tides crashing against its hull. Whole worlds, entire suns, drowning in the Sea of Souls.
‘I have never sailed into a warp rift,’ she managed to say. If the Exalted replied, she never heard it.
But I have, the Covenant hissed.
She knew the tales, as every Navigator did. To plough into a warp rift was no different than swimming in acid. Each moment within its tides flayed ever more of a sailor’s soul.
Legends and half-truths, the ship mocked her. It is the warp, and it is the void. Calmer than the storm, louder than space. And then, Brace, Navigator.
Octavia closed her human eyes and opened her truest one. Madness, in a million shades of black, swarmed towards her like a tide. Forever present in the darkness, a beam of abrasive light seared its way through the chaos, burning away the stuff of screaming souls and formless malice that rippled against its edges. A beacon in the black, the Golden Path, the Emperor’s Light.
The Astronomican, she breathed in instinctive awe, and aimed the ship towards it. Solace, guidance, blessed light. Safety.
The Covenant rebelled, its hull straining against her, creaking and cracking under the strain.
No. Away from the Beacon of Pain. Into the tides of night.
The Navigator leaned back in her throne, licking sweat from her upper lip. The feeling taking hold reminded her of standing in the observatory atop her father’s house-spire, feeling the unbelievable urge to leap from the balcony of the tallest tower. She’d felt it often as a child, that prickly sense of daring and doubt clashing inside her until the moment she leaned just a little too far. Her stomach would lurch and she’d come back to herself. She couldn’t jump. She didn’t want to – not really.
The ship roared in her mind as it rolled, the waters of hell crashing against its hull. Her ears hosted the unwelcome, ignorable sounds of human crew members shouting several decks above.
You will destroy us all, the ship spat into her brain. Too weak, too weak.
Octavia was faintly certain she’d puked on herself. It smelled like it. Claws stroked the ship’s hull with the sound of squealing tyres, and the crashing of the warp’s tides became the thudding beat of a mother’s heart, overpoweringly loud to the child still slumbering in the womb.
She turned her head, watching the Astronomican darken and diminish. Was it rising away, out of her reach? Or was the ship falling from it, into th–
She suddenly tensed, blood like ice and muscles locked tighter than steel. They were free-falling through the warp. The Exalted’s cry of desperate anger rang throughout every deck, carried over the vox.
Throne, she breathed the word, swearing with her heart and soul, barely cognisant of her lips speaking over the vox to the helmsmen on the command deck above. Her speech was automatic, as instinctive as breathing. The battle in her mind was what mattered.
Throne and shit and fu–
The ship righted. Not elegantly – she’d almost lost their way completely, and the vessel’s recovery was anything but clean – but the ship pounded into a calmer stream with both relief and abandon. The Covenant’s hull gave a last horrendous spasm, rocked to its core as she stared the way she wished to go.
She felt the primal machine-spirit calming. The ship obeyed her course, as true and straight as a sword. Even if it loathed her, it flew far finer than the fat barge she’d suffered on under Kartan Syne. Where the Maiden of the Stars wallowed, the Covenant of Blood raced. Untouchable grace and wrath incarnate. No one in her bloodline, not in thirty-six generations, had guided such a vessel.
You are beautiful, she told the ship without meaning to.
And you are weak.
Octavia stared into the tides around the ship. Above, the Emperor’s Light receded, while below, the faint outlines of great shapeless things thrashed in the infinite, turgid black. She sailed by instinct, blinder than she’d ever been before, guiding them all towards a distant eye in the storm.
VIII
THE CITY AT NIGHT
He knew he was one of the slow children.
That was the word his tutors used to describe the children that sat separate from the others, and he knew he belonged with them. In his class, four of the children were slow – already, he formed the word in his mind with the same delicate emphasis the adults around him used when they said it – and the four of them sat by the window, often completely ignoring the tutor’s words, yet never suffering punishment for it.
The boy sat with them, the fourth and newest of the four, and stared out of the window with the others. Cars passed in the night, their front lamps dull to ease any strain on the eyes. The clouded sky was hidden by tower-tops, each spire decorated by great illuminated signs selling whatever it was that adults felt they needed.
The boy turned back to his tutor. For a while, he listened to her speaking about language, teaching the other children – the not slow children – words that were new to them. The boy didn’t understand at all. Why were the words new to everyone? He’d read them in his mother’s books a dozen times before.
The tutor hesitated as she noticed him looking. Usually she ignored him, forgetting he was there with casual, practised familiarity. The boy didn’t look away from her. He wondered if she would try to teach him a new word.
As it happened, she did. She pointed to a word written across the flickering vid-screen and asked him if he knew its meaning.
The boy didn’t answer. The boy only rarely answered his tutor. He suspected it was why the adults called him slow.
As the chime pulsed once, heralding the end of tuition for the night, all of the children rose from the seats. Most of them packed writing pads away. The slow ones put away scraps of paper with childish drawings. The boy had nothing to pack, for he’d done little but stare out the window all evening.
The walk home took over an hou
r, and was even slower in the rain. The boy walked past cars trapped in traffic queues, listening to the drivers scream at one other. Not far from where he walked, only a block or two away, he heard the popcorn crackle of gunfire. Two gangs fighting it out. He wondered which ones, and if many had died.
It wasn’t a surprise when his friend caught up with him, but the boy had been hoping to be left alone tonight. He gave a smile to pretend he wasn’t annoyed. His friend returned it.
His friend wasn’t really his friend. They only called each other friends because their mothers were real friends, and the two families lived in hab-chambers next to each other.
‘The tutor asked you a question tonight,’ his friend said, as if the boy hadn’t realised.
‘I know.’
‘But why didn’t you answer? Didn’t you know what to say?’
That was the problem. The boy never knew what to say, even when he knew the right answer.
‘I don’t understand why we go to tuition,’ he said at last. Around them, the city lived and breathed as it always did. Tyres screeched in the next road. Shouted voices accused, demanded, pleaded with other shouting voices. Music pounded from inside nearby buildings.
‘To learn,’ his friend said. His mother had told the boy that his friend would grow up to ‘break hearts one night’. The boy couldn’t see it. To the boy, his friend always seemed confused, angry, or angry about being confused.
‘Our tutor never says anything I didn’t know before,’ the boy shrugged. ‘But why do we need to learn? That’s what I don’t understand.’
‘Because... we do.’ His friend looked confused, and that made the boy smile. ‘When you even bother to speak, you ask some really stupid questions.’
The boy let it rest. His friend never understood this kind of thing.
About halfway home, well into the maze of alleys and back roads that the adults all called the Labyrinth, the boy stopped walking. He stared down a side alleyway, neither hiding nor making himself known. Just watching.
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