The ship had entered the warp.
He’d seen it coming. They’d all seen it coming; the way the stars twisted in their astral sockets, and the way the ship itself groaned right through to its metal core. A few of his warriors had leapt from the ship’s back – sailors abandoning a sinking ship – to die a freezing death in the endless void rather than be dragged into the Sea of Souls.
One moment he was boot-locked to the ship’s hull, axe in hand, hewing into the sloped iron to hack his way back in. The next he was drowning, asphyxiating in liquid fire, suffocating even as it disintegrated him from the outside and incinerated him from within. He died a dozen deaths in a single heartbeat, and he felt every single one of them.
As had his brothers. When the molten sludge flowed over the ship, blanketing them all, he’d seen most of them lose their grips on the hull. Warriors he’d served with for decades, even centuries, spun away in the boiling madness of warp space, screaming as they dissolved. Several lingered by their burning bones in a shrieking, spectral form, before the raging tides ate at their very soul-stuff, immolating even that, before carrying the residue away to be diluted through the tumbling waves.
He refused to let go. The molten flood tore his axe from his grip, then his armour from his body, but he wouldn’t relinquish his grip. It stripped his body from his bones, and his bones from his soul. Still, he held fast.
Then came the shadow, vast enough and dark enough to eclipse the howling witchlight of unspace.
Caleb had opened his eyes to the stars once more. True stars, the winking orbs of distant suns, flashing in the night, and the ship’s hull beneath his boots.
Not dead. Not dead at all. Wreathed in Corsair ceramite, axe in his grip.
Alone, though. Utterly alone on the ship’s skin, weapon in hand but a brother to none.
Caleb had cut, and cut, and cut, descending deeper into the ship with each fall of the energised axe blade.
He found his first prey within minutes, and when that shrieking, clawed warrior was dead, the Red Corsair hacked the Raptor’s body into ceramite-coated chunks, and scooped the meat into his maw with trembling fingers.
Not enough. Not enough at all. He still hungered.
He could smell something, something sweet but indefinable, colouring the air of the ship’s corridors. Caleb breathed slower, savouring the scent, almost able to taste it. Something touched by the warp, sickly-saccharine in its resistance to corruption, and with the rarest, sweetest blood in the human species. Every drop of sanguine life squeezed from its crushed heart would be divine nectar.
The Red Corsair loped forwards into a feral run.
XXIV
VANDRED
The Exalted stalked the bridge, its many-knuckled claws clenching and releasing, forming gnarled fists one moment, and opening like ugly flowers in slow bloom the next.
The Atramentar – all seven that remained after Vraal’s death at Crythe – had assembled on the strategium to attend their lord and master, for their lord and master was furious.
One of the Terminators hefted a two-handed maul, resting the massive hammerhead on his shoulder guard. The pauldron’s sculpted face was the roaring visage of a Nostraman lion. Light reflecting from the hammer gave it eyes of staring gold.
‘The prophet has not betrayed you, lord.’
‘You cannot know that, Garadon.’
The Exalted still paced, albeit in a hunched, brutish stalk. Each of its footsteps sent a throb through the deck. The crew were growing uneasy, for the warlord scarcely left its throne unless something out of arm’s reach needed berating or destroying.
‘We cannot linger here indefinitely. They will track us... Hunt us down... Huron has warp-cunning magi who can part the Sea of Souls.’
Malek, Champion of the Atramentar, had occupied himself thus far by triggering his lightning claws every few minutes, repeatedly inspecting them. They’d scythe from their housings on the back of his power fists, only to snap-slide back after yet another brief examination.
‘You also have a warp-cunning magus, lord.’
The Exalted spat acid onto the deck, dismissing the very idea. ‘Ruven excels at three roles: that of a warlock, a traitor, and a waste of skin. If I have traded a genuine seer, a Navigator, and three dozen Bleeding Eye Raptors... in exchange for possessing Ruven...’
The Exalted spat again, and a crew member jumped out of the way of the lethal gobbet. ‘...then I will lose my temper,’ the daemon finished. ‘And those around me will lose their blood.’
‘Auspex lock, my lord.’
The Exalted’s wet-throated growl rippled around the bridge. ‘At last, they return.’
‘A second auspex lock, lord. And a third.’
Limbless servitors slaved to the scanner table began to murmur in binary cant, tracking the inbound vessels with the cogitators embedded in their skulls. The Exalted tuned into the babble breaking out across the strategium, already returning to its throne.
‘Cobra-class destroyers,’ called the Master of Auspex.
The daemon licked its maw, as if seeking forgotten morsels of food left between its teeth. The creature’s tongue was long enough to lick the vitreous humours from its own eyes, which it occasionally did to clean them. Daemonic ascension had deprived the Exalted’s face of eyelids. It did not miss them.
‘Outriders?’ asked Malek. ‘Or the vanguard of something much more?’
‘We will know after we destroy them.’ Assurance flowed through the Exalted’s tone again. Void war. A void war they could win. The salvage alone from breaking a tri-Cobra squadron, if the vessels could be kept reasonably intact, would be the haul of a solar year. ‘All ahead full. Shields up, gun ports open, all lances online and weapon batteries live.’
A chorus of Ayes answered the creature’s decrees. The Covenant itself leapt to obey, engines opening up hot, bright and wide, bellowing plumes of promethium thrust-fire into the silence of space.
The ship moved now as it once had, before the decades of punishing crusades and patchwork repairs left her no more than a revenant with a majestic past. Between the Hell’s Iris crews and the raw material from Ganges, the Exalted had done exactly what it set out to achieve: the years of neglect and shame were finally being cast aside in favour of reigniting an ancient aggression. They were hunters again. Void hunters.
The daemon’s flesh-heart quickened behind the uncomfortable cage of its ribs. On the occulus, the three ships resolved into daggers of detail, their flanks, turrets and towers painted in the Tyrant’s scarlet.
‘Do not target their weapon arrays. I want those for the ripest salvage. When they launch torpedoes, take everything on the forward shields, only rolling and yawing to starboard if they buckle below one-third strength. Precision shield-breaking lance strikes as we dive towards the lead ship, then a one-quarter volley from the broadsides as we cut through their formation.’
A multitude of hungers, each unified only by how fierce they felt, gleamed in the daemon’s black eyes.
‘Lord, a new auspex lock. A cruiser, amalgamated class. And another, led by significant warp-wake... No, another three. It’s another destroyer squadron – parasites to the cruiser.’
‘They’re a vanguard.’ Malek cursed under his breath, but his tusked helm vocalised it as a buzzing sigh. ‘We should run, lord. The Covenant has only just been reborn. To win a fight while sustaining crippling damage will be no victory at all.’
‘You are beginning to sound like the prophet.’ The Exalted leered at the occulus, paying Malek little heed. ‘Six destroyers and a fat-bellied cruiser? We could run this gauntlet blind, and still come out unscathed. Still, I am not blind to the danger, here. After we destroy the first three ships, we will maintain a conservative distance until the scene is fully set. I have no wish to take an armada head-on.’
Several more auspex chimes rang out across the command deck.
‘Lord...’
‘Speak, fool.’
‘Another nine ships have brok
en from the warp. Three of them are capital cruisers. We have a six-strong squadron of Iconoclast-class destroyers burning hot to flank us.’
The Exalted’s nasty, feral sneer died on its face.
‘All hands to battle stations. All Claws to defensive positions, standing by to repel boarders. Inform the “Navigator” that we will be needing his guidance very, very shortly.’
‘Incoming torpedoes, lord.’
The Exalted licked corrosive saliva from its fanged teeth, and spoke the words it loathed more than any other.
‘Brace for impact.’
She puked this time. It poured from her in wet, slapping chunks, spreading across the surface of the blood-tainted water.
‘No more.’ She breathed the words, unable to give them any truer voice. ‘No more. Please, no more. Not until the ship is cleansed.’
Hound wiped her lips with the cleanest edge of his cloak. Over the vox-speakers, Talos’s voice echoed around the befouled chamber.
‘You did well, Navigator. Rest for now.’
‘I don’t believe what I’m seeing.’
Cyrion said the words in an awed whisper. Slowly, he removed his helm, needing to look upon the screen with unclouded eyes. ‘I do not believe what I’m seeing.’
Talos didn’t reply. The occulus focussed on a distant battle, following the twisting, wrenching, burning hulk at the heart of it all.
The Covenant of Blood tore through the centre of the enemy fleet, its shields flashing with oil-on-water iridescence. Wounds along its midnight hull spoke of previous shield ruptures, as fire-trails burned in ravine cracks along the ship’s armour.
As they bore witness, the Covenant boosted even faster, pitching down at the last moment to glide beneath an enemy vessel of almost equal size. The bloated ship struggled in futility to come about in time, while the sleeker strike cruiser slipped underneath, rolling to present its starboard broadsides towards the enemy’s underbelly. Every cannon on the Covenant’s side raged across the scarce distance between the two cruisers, massed plasma streams and clustered laser-fire raking the Corsair ship’s keel.
‘That’s a kill,’ Mercutian said softly. ‘Watch, brothers. That’s a kill.’
The Covenant didn’t stay to observe. It thrust away, engines burning with unsustainable fury. In its wake, the Corsair cruiser rolled, cracked, and came apart along its underbelly. Detonations blazed along the length of the ship, as if it were a child’s toy to be pulled apart at the seams. Within a handful of seconds it was a fireball, crumbling in on itself, towers toppling into its burning core. The shockwave of its exploding plasma core sent nearby smaller ships rocking, pushing them off course.
‘Master of Auspex, how many enemy ships do we count?’
‘Twelve, my lord. Wreckage shows four already destroyed.’
Talos stared at the Covenant, watching it burn.
‘Accelerate to attack speed, and open a vox-channel to the Covenant.’
The Exalted played a dangerous game. It, the daemon itself, was no master of fleet warfare. It was a hunter, a predator, a killer without conscience or compare; but it was no void warrior.
To command a vessel in a void war was to immerse oneself in the absolute saturation of incoming information. Shouted numbers and binary codes were distances to and from other ships, pertaining to every vessel’s projected pitch, roll and yaw, as well as the intricacies and vagaries of each object’s estimated movements in three-dimensional space. The Exalted attuned itself to this state of ruthless focus by doing as it always had in the past: it reached back into the mind it now mastered, and peeled back the malingering human presence to reveal the core of relevant lore beneath.
Memories. Vandred’s memories. While the understanding of these maddening astral dances was not something the Exalted possessed itself, it could flay its host’s brain open with a thought and rifle through the Night Lord’s psyche. Once inside, it took no more than a moment’s concentration to wear the memories and drape itself in the comprehension as if these thoughts had always been the daemon’s own.
Vandred possessed a wealth of such perceptions. In life, he’d been a void warrior without compare. It was what elevated him to the rank of Tenth Captain in the months following Malcharion’s demise.
The Exalted plundered its host’s mind with the same tenacity it plundered the Imperium’s material wealth. No difference existed between the two acts. The strong took from the weak – it was the way of things.
But with Vandred’s increasing withdrawal, the human’s diminishing soul took his fading memories with him to the edge of oblivion.
The Exalted remained unconcerned at first. Vandred was a nuisance, but his consciousness could still be looted at will. It only became a trial when the human’s remnant spark developed an irritating capacity for cunning. Vandred began to fall silent, instead of screaming uselessly, silently, at his former brethren for aid. He hid from the questing thought-tendrils the Exalted sent back into their shared brain. He buried his most valuable, useful memories, storing them away and defending them with vexing tenacity.
Even so, the Exalted tolerated it. It suspected enough of Vandred’s imprint remained in the physical brain to allow shallow memory-stripping, even if the Night Lord’s soul expired forever.
Their relationship of exploitive, hateful symbiosis had functioned – albeit with steady erosion – for over a century...
...until the moment sixteen Red Corsair warships shattered their way into realspace and locked weapons on the Covenant of Blood.
The Exalted watched the updating, evolving hololithic display, and while it could comprehend what it saw, it could infer little from its flickering runic displays, and could predict next to nothing. Without wearing Vandred’s perceptions as a shroud over its own, the babbling behaviour of lesser species – the games of these flesh-things – made almost no sense at all.
Attack. Destroy. Plunder. The Exalted understood these terms. It grasped the basic precepts of void war. What it lacked was the comprehension of logistics; of strategy; of the masterful difference tactics, knowledge and prediction would make to any battle.
The warships came closer.
The Exalted reached back into its host’s mind, and found nothing.
Mortal bridge crew began to request orders. The Exalted delayed them with irritated snarls, and ransacked the shared brain. Nothing. No memories at all. Vandred was still hiding, or gone completely.
It took several seconds in the material realm, and a great deal longer in the daemon’s own time-loose psyche, but the Exalted closed its claw around Vandred’s shrunken soul at last. The Night Lord put up little in the way of struggle, for erosion had weakened it unto extinction.
No matter. The Exalted peeled lore from its presence, layering its own essence with stolen understanding. This was a ritual between carcass and carrion-feeder that the two of them had played out many times before, even at Crythe, when the Covenant’s assault impressed even the Warmaster.
And as always, Vandred released his life’s knowledge in weak spools for the Exalted to devour.
But it wasn’t enough. The blinking runes made sense; the creature could guess the likeliest actions of the enemy vessels based on their bulk, armament and support craft; but it wasn’t enough. To the Exalted’s blossoming comprehension, every analysis it made of the situation led to the same result.
It was going to lose.
The Exalted was going to be destroyed here, cast back into the turmoil of the warp, forced to linger in the chaotic nothingness until another ideal host-husk made itself known.
The daemon clutched at the fading soul, leeching its life in a panicked suction for answers.
Vandred’s embers resonated amusement. The Covenant cannot stand against sixteen ships. To face the four cruisers alone would be mutually assured destruction. Their escorts tip the balance in the enemy’s favour.
Lies.
The Exalted could not, would not, die here.
What do you want from me, dae
mon? The Covenant is a prince of ships, born in a greater age. But it is not invulnerable. You have spent decades breaking it apart, piece by piece, only to lose it completely mere days after its resurrection.
Panicked now, the Exalted ignored the demands of its bridge crew, ransacking random memories in the hope of finding something, anything to use as a weapon to save its own existence. For the first time in a century, the daemon had shown weakness. It had a brief, terrible second to sense the Night Lord’s smile.
Vandred struck with the full force of everything he’d been hiding back. Memories of brotherhood, of wars waged under burning skies, of void duels won in the name of a Legion he would willingly die for. The full spectrum of human emotion and experience, from a child’s barely remembered fears to the murderer’s pride in the way blood trickles down pale flesh.
Memory after memory, perception after perception, spilled into the shared mind. And none of them belonged to the Exalted.
Vandred screamed. The cry began in his mind...
...and left his monstrous jaws in a roar.
The first thing to hit him was the way it felt to breathe. It hurt. His lungs burned. Sensation flooded over him as if he’d just been pushed from the womb into the bright, cold world. He roared again, and this time it ended as laughter.
The ship was shaking around him, already taking damage. The Corsairs were wily bastards; they knew how to strike, and it wouldn’t be long before the Covenant’s warp engines were rendered worthless by enemy fire. If Vandred tried to run, he’d only hasten his death by offering a ripe target.
The other choice was the only choice. Stand. Fight.
‘Gunnery Officer Jowun,’ he growled through a lion’s smile.
The man flinched as he was addressed. ‘My lord?’
Vandred gestured to the hololithic, forcing himself not to be distracted by the clawed monstrosity that his right hand had become.
‘We will begin with that Murder-class cruiser, Jowun. Ready the lances.’
The Covenant burned, and still it fought.
Its port broadsides were a black, smeared scar along its hull. Two of its primary booster vents were melted slag, causing fires throughout the enginarium deck and untold deaths among the most menial of the slave crew. Much of its battlement architecture and statuary simply didn’t exist any more, torn from the ship’s spine by massed enemy fire. Sections of the aftcastle had suffered a similar fate. Barely a square metre of armour plating had escaped charring, scoring, or outright ruination. Much of the vessel burned with ghostly, void-sucked flames, while water and air pissed and breathed into space from canyons carved in its hull – the former freezing to become streams of ice crystals; the latter dissipating, dying in the breathlessness of the deep void.
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