Night Lords Omnibus

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  With the sigh of contented machinery settling, the gunship’s landing claws crunched into the wasteland’s skin.

  Mercutian and Xarl were already running aboard.

  ‘Lord,’ Septimus’s voice crackled from the cockpit. ‘You’re the last squad. The Exalted reports that all is ready for your return.’

  Talos looked back at Vilamus. The fortress’s towers reached too high to ascertain where they ended and the clouds began. By contrast, its lowest levels were practically aflame, thick smoke bleeding from the shell-cracks in the great walls.

  A victory, but not their victory. This was a game played by another band of traitors, and it had tasted hollow from beginning to end.

  Uzas remained with him.

  ‘Are you ashamed?’ he voxed.

  Talos turned. ‘What?’

  Uzas gestured with his axe, aiming it at the fortress. ‘Are you ashamed to be running from another fight, brother? You shouldn’t be. This is meaningless. Our fight is about to begin.’

  ‘Uzas?’ Talos asked. ‘Brother?’

  ‘Hnnh?’

  ‘You spoke with such clarity. It was... it was good to hear.’

  Uzas nodded. ‘Come. Prey waits in the heavens. Blood, skulls and souls.’

  ‘And our ship.’

  ‘Hnnh. And our ship.’

  Octavia went to the one place she knew there’d be no one to talk to, while Hound waited outside.

  She needed sleep. Just a few hours, maybe, before Talos returned and asked her to take part in the most dangerous and insane night of her life.

  She’d never been in Septimus’s room before. Given how he teased her for her mess, it wasn’t as tidy as she’d expected. Mechanical innards and oiled cloths were spread over half the floor, as if he’d been summoned away in the middle of dissecting some unknown machine. A wide workbench stood against one wall, a low bunk against another. Several pairs of boots – one with its lost laces replaced by adhesive tape – were scattered in a tumble under the desk.

  It smelled of him in the room, though – the rich, oaky incense of cleaning oils; the scent of a man’s clean sweat while he worked; the spicy, almost antique smell of well-worn, well-loved leather.

  Octavia turned one of his parchments over, into the light of the workbench lamp.

  Her own face looked back at her.

  Her own features, rendered in charcoal, sketched onto the paper. She wore her bandana, her face tilted slightly to the side, gazing off the page at something unseen. Above the corner of her lips was the little mole her maids had always insisted on calling a beauty mark.

  She turned another sheet, revealing an unfinished vignette of her throne, with her blankets and a cushion heaped against one side. The third parchment was a self-portrait, rougher than the other sketches, with his augmetic left eye and temple undrawn. The fourth and fifth were both Octavia again; this time wearing a scowl in both images, her eyes narrowed and her lips between pursing and pouting. She wondered if she really looked like that when she was annoyed – it was a withering look, straight from the wealthy, spoiled halls of aristocratic Terra.

  The next sheet showed a hand-drawn schematic of a Legionary’s gauntlet, and the next, a list of words in numbered order, all written in Nostraman. She could read enough to guess it pertained to the gauntlet diagram.

  She turned the rest one by one, seeing herself several more times. By the end, she was blushing, no longer tired at all when Hound thumped on the door.

  ‘Mistress, mistress... Wake up. The ship moves. It’s time soon.’

  Captain Caleb Valadan looked up as the sirens began to wail. Hazard lights flashed yellow in their wall-mountings. The doors – the accursed doors – slammed closed with brutal finality, trapping over fifty of his men and their war machines in the hangar.

  Corsairs rose from their knees, their oath-swearing rituals ending with an abruptness born of confusion.

  ‘Commander,’ Caleb voxed. He expected nothing but static, and his expectations were met. Curse the vox. Curse the solar storm. Curse the–

  + Initialising purge in: thirty seconds + announced the automated wall-speakers.

  Every one of his warriors was standing now, their talismans and battle-trophies rattling against their armour. The hazard lights flashed brighter. He felt a sickening pull on his attention, and turned to face the shielded hangar bay opening.

  The shield itself was a mellow screen of thin mist, clouding vision just enough to be noticeable. Beyond it, the void – the pinprick multitudes of distant suns, and a crescent slice of the thirsty, lifeless world below.

  If this was a true purge...

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Shut your mouth,’ Caleb snapped. ‘I’m thinking.’

  + Initialising purge in: twenty seconds +

  ‘Into the gunships!’ he ordered.

  + Initialising purge in: ten seconds +

  Variel watched the occulus, his gaze flicking between both populated hangars.

  ‘See? They are secure within the grounded gunships. All is well.’

  Inwardly, he was cursing. It’d been too much to hope that this would work with such unbelievable ease, but trapping them like this was something, at least. He watched Caleb’s armoured form sprint up a rising gang ramp, and silently wished him an intensely painful demise.

  The picture was the same in both hangars. The Corsairs reacted with admirable haste, saving themselves. This would be a problem, but one that could be dealt with in the near future.

  + Initialising purge... Initialising purge +

  The void shields covering the yawning hangar bays gave uncoordinated flutters, their radiance dimming. The primary hangar went first, its shield dissipating like engine exhaust in a gale, drifting out into the airless void. The second failed a moment later, repeating the same blown-smoke dissolution.

  Variel watched the air roaring out in great flapping sheets of force, howling silently on the screen – an exhalation into space from lungs that could draw nothing back in. Crates rolled across the deck, spinning and leaping in their rush to fly into the void’s gaping maw. Servitors, too brainless to realise the threat to their own lobotomised existences, went next. Dozens remained perfectly still as they flashed through the air, sucked out into space. Others still attempted to twist and turn as they flew, unable to understand why their limbs wouldn’t respond. They mouthed error codes as they failed to attend their duties.

  Racks of missiles, heavy bolter ammunition and unattached rocket pods spun and flew free in a near-constant stream. Variel winced as a hellstrike missile smashed into a wall on its way out.

  The vehicles were next. The unsecured autoloaders and heavy lifter buggies crashed together and flipped end over end. A Land Raider in mid-loading slid back with punishing slowness, sparks spattering from its treads as they left grind-scars on the decking. When it fell from the hangar at last, it was with a jerking yank, as if some unseen hand finally claimed it as a prize.

  In all, the vacuum took less than a minute to void both launch decks.

  The three Thunderhawk gunships remained locked in their racks, filled with warriors Variel had hoped to see die. A similar scene appeared in the other hangar, but for the shuddering, squealing form of one gunship being dragged across the landing pad. Free of its rack, the vacuum had almost taken it before its pilot could fire the engines. Instead it lay scarred and wounded in the hangar’s heart, all three landing claws severed by the strain.

  Variel turned to the bridge commander.

  ‘Illuminate the contamination warder beacons. We must ensure none of our sister ships attempt to lend aid until we have the situation under control.’

  ‘Contamination warders alight, lord.’ The occulus switched to a view of the warship’s spine, where miserable, pulsing red lights flared along its vertebrae battlements. They put Variel in mind of boils, ready and ripe, in desperate need of suppuration.

  ‘Bring the ship away from the fleet. High orbit.’

  He waited, standing by the c
ommand throne, watching the sedate drift of stars.

  ‘Should we re-pressurise the launch bays?’

  ‘No. Our warriors are safe for now.’

  ‘Lord, the Eighth Legion warship Covenant of Blood is shadowing us.’

  The concourse doors opened before Variel could weave more deception into a plan quickly coming unravelled. A lone Red Corsair entered, his bolter in his hands, his helm crested by two curving horns of cracked ivory. With a measured tread, he descended to where Variel was standing.

  ‘Flayer? Sir, what in the name of unholy piss is going on?’

  Again, the Apothecary was denied the chance to answer. One of the console officers called back in a panic.

  ‘Lord! The Covenant is launching boarding torpedoes.’

  Now or never. Now or never. Now, or I die here.

  ‘Valmisai, shul’celadaan,’ he let his voice carry across the bridge. ‘Flishatha sey shol voroshica.’

  The crew looked at one another. A few rested hands on holstered sidearms, but most looked confused.

  His Red Corsair brother didn’t move a muscle. ‘And what does that mean?’

  Variel drew and fired in a single movement, the shell pounding into the Corsair’s throat armour and bursting inside his neck. There wasn’t even a strangled cry. One moment two Corsairs stood speaking, and the next, one collapsed without a head.

  Several seconds later, the spinning helm came back down and clattered onto the decking with the dull clunnnggg of ceramite on metal.

  ‘It means the Eighth Legion is taking this ship back. We are about to receive guests, at which point, this ship must be made ready to make a brief warp jump. Anyone who opposes these actions should speak up now. I was not jesting when I said I needed a new cloak.’

  XXII

  ECHO OF DAMNATION

  The shaking set Octavia’s teeth knocking together. Being leashed into an oversized throne didn’t help; she was clutching her restraint straps much tighter than they were returning the favour, and her hips thudded against the seat’s sides as the turbulence rattled her around.

  Maruc was next to her, his hands as white-knuckled as hers. He may have been yelling, but the noise stole any evidence of it.

  ‘Is it always like this?’ she cried out.

  ‘Yes,’ one of the Legionaries voxed back. ‘Always. Except Uzas is usually screaming about blood, and Xarl likes to howl.’

  ‘Blood for the Blood God! Souls, skulls, souls, skulls...’

  ‘See?’

  Octavia turned her juddering head to look over at Talos. He was sat calmly by comparison, his weapons locked to the pod’s wall behind him. She wasn’t even sure it had been him yelling back over his vox-speakers.

  Xarl leaned back to give a full-throated howl. His helm’s vox-speakers corrupted it, rendering it with a tinny edge, but that did nothing to diminish the volume. The four humans covered their ears – even Hound, who had not been able to say a word yet with the way the pod was shaking. His tiny voice had no hope of registering over the din.

  ‘Fifteen seconds,’ Talos yelled over to her.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I always wanted my own ship,’ Cyrion leaned forward to shout. ‘Talos, you can have the next one we steal.’

  She smiled even as she winced at the noise. Across the pod, she met Septimus’s gaze. For the first time in a while, she found she couldn’t hold it.

  ‘Five. Four. Three. Two. O–’

  The impact was like nothing she’d ever felt. For several heartstopping seconds, she genuinely thought she’d died. Surely, there was no way of surviving the bone-jarring pound of slamming into a warship’s hull at such speed. The impact boom made the pod ride beforehand sound as serene as her father’s tower-top garden at midnight. It eclipsed thunder, dwarfed even the rolling crashes of warp-waves hitting her hull... Even with her ears covered, she was sure she’d be hearing that devastating ocean-crash of sound for the rest of her short, deaf life.

  She tried to say, ‘I think I’m dead,’ but couldn’t hear her own voice.

  Light streamed into the pod’s far end. Artificial, pale and unhealthy light, it rushed in and brought an unwelcome stink inside with it. She coughed on the pungent stench of unwashed bodies, rusting metal, and human beings shitting themselves for a moment’s sick warmth in freezing corridors.

  ‘Ugh,’ one of the Night Lords snorted. ‘It reeks like Hell’s Iris in there.’

  Talos tore his weapons from the wall, and left the pod without a word. His brothers followed. His slaves had to jog to keep up. Octavia was the last to leave, checking her pistol for what was surely the hundredth time.

  ‘Vishi tha?’ a voice asked from inside the pod.

  She saw Septimus, Maruc, Hound and the giant forms of First Claw ahead in the corridor. For a moment she couldn’t follow, but nor could she look round.

  ‘Vishi tha?’ the little girl asked again. It sounded as if she was sat in the pod, waiting on one of the oversized thrones.

  ‘You’re dead.’ Octavia squeezed the words through closed teeth. ‘You’re dead and gone.’

  ‘I can still kill you,’ the girl said in sugar-sweet Gothic. Octavia turned, pistol raised, aiming into an empty pod.

  ‘Keep up,’ Septimus called back to her. ‘Come on.’

  Thus far, it had been a rather bloodless coup – barring a handful of regrettable incidents – and Variel watched the occulus with something approaching pride. The crew were nervous, unsure, excited, polluting the air with sweat-scent and fear-breath, all of which Variel loathed inhaling. He wore his helm just to keep the human stink from invading his lungs, content to breathe his armour’s stale air supply instead.

  Why the Night Lords found such things intoxicating was beyond him.

  The Red Corsair fleet remained in low orbit, its focus ostensibly on the world beneath their hulls. With vox and auspex worthless, it was impossible to know if any other vessel had even witnessed the infinitesimal boarding projectiles spearing through space to drive home in the Echo’s hull.

  The fleet’s sheer scale was a disguise in itself. No armada this size could allow its ships to drift near each other while they rode at orbital anchor, and flotilla formation was a matter of calculating hundreds of kilometres between the biggest cruisers. The fleet’s outrider vessels plied the distances between the bulkier warships, ready to react to threats breaking from the warp farther out in the system.

  He watched a destroyer squadron sail past, their sleek dagger-prows cutting between the Covenant and the Echo. The squadron’s speed remained the same throughout; with fluid, arcing trajectories, they rode the void to another cluster of cruisers.

  A routine patrol. All was well.

  ‘Lord?’ asked the female officer he’d unwittingly and unofficially promoted, purely by virtue of her proximity to him at the moment of a murder.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Captain Caleb is... active, sir.’

  He hadn’t waited long.

  The purge was no accident, and no mere malfunction. Nothing had triggered the bioweapon alarms within the hangar, which ruled out any actual threat. The launch deck still lingered in vacuum, with the bay portal shieldless and left open to the void. Ice crystals glittered in a delicate rime across what little equipment remained in the hangar, painting the metal gunships with a patina of frost.

  The gunships weren’t fuelled yet. That ruled out the most obvious solution, even if their thrusters could be fired in cold vacuum.

  Caleb Valadan possessed many virtues that made him an effective leader, but patience was most assuredly not one of them. Someone, somewhere, had tried to kill him on his own ship. And someone, somewhere, was going to pay for it very shortly.

  He crossed the launch bay in a slow stride, his boots mag-locking with each step. Once he reached the immense doors leading back into the ship, he stroked his hand across the rimed steel, brushing aside the fast-forming ice dust.

  These doors couldn’t be cut, couldn’t be cleaved. Depressurising the
rest of the ship wasn’t even a worry – the hangar doors were supremely thick, cored by dense metals, designed to resist anything that could endanger the vessel.

  Beneath his helm, his brand-scars were itching again. The freshest one – imprinted for the sixth time in as many days to stave off his regenerative healing – was still raw enough to be painful. Balls of the Gods, what he wouldn’t give to scratch it.

  Caleb withdrew his hand, leaving crystals of glitter-frost drifting in the lack of air.

  ‘Marauders,’ he said over the short-range vox. ‘If we can’t cut our way in, we’ll cut our way out.’

  Variel tilted his head. He’d not seen this coming, either.

  The beetle forms of his distant brothers began their halting march across the weightless bay, boots keeping them tight to the deck. Caleb was at the lip, only metres from walking out onto the external hull.

  Variel forced his teeth to unclench. This was not his role, and he was losing his temper. If he’d desired a position of command, he’d have betrayed his way to one long ago.

  ‘Activate bay security fields,’ he said.

  Intolerable. Truly intolerable.

  Caleb spoke several languages, from Old Badabian to the trade-tongue of Hell’s Iris, used as a communal lexicon by the station’s native population. He swore now in every language he knew, which took some time. Then he turned to his men. Already, grey frost was lightening his blood-and-black ceramite. It sprinkled as powder from his joints as he moved.

  ‘Squads Xalis and Dharvan – get over to the far side of the deck and load that Vindicator. We’ll breach the external hull.’

  ‘Sire...’

  ‘Look around you, Xalis. Look around, drink in the beauty of this fine sight, and ask yourself if now is really the time to argue with me.’

  The image on the occulus shook, but it was too distant from the bridge to feel any translated tremors.