That meant one of two things: a serious failure in duty that had not been a matter of record, or a catastrophic loss in the political manoeuvres of the fleet and crusade command staff. Looking at Spika now – radiating command while eyeball to eyeball with a commissar – Miletus thought he had a good idea which was the case.
After a long second, Spika rose from his chair and walked towards a set of wood-lined doors at the back of the command deck.
‘All officers of the deck, attend.’
Kader opened her mouth to speak.
‘Not a point I am going to give on,’ he said, before her objection had reached her tongue.
Miletus hesitated, unsure of where he should be. As though in answer, Spika looked directly at him.
‘Mister Cern, until you are allocated a station you are an officer of the bridge. That means you should be following.’
Miletus saluted and hurried to join the officers making towards the doors. The space beyond was a stateroom, small compared to those of some ships. Pictures hung on the walls, scenes of mythic idylls in faded oil framed by heavy gilt. The table in the middle of the room was polished wood. The image of an old Terran compass rose sat at its centre, inlaid in yellowing bone. Miletus noticed that small pieces of the inlay were missing. Busts of stern-faced Naval officers that he did not recognise looked down at him from niches.
The room and all its details felt like a microcosm of the ship as a whole: old, its grandeur worn down by use, its style and pride fitted to a different place and time. Filled with bodies it felt cramped, a space put to a use that it was not intended for. Miletus noticed that most of the officers looked either young or old, with little in between: a Master of Artifice with her white-grey hair cropped close above a creased face, a second lieutenant who barely looked older than Miletus. At the back, standing next to the sealed doors, he noticed the sergeant-at-arms who had been in the hangar. The face that had been under the pressure helm was clean-shaven, glossy scars webbing the dark skin. Blue augmetic lenses sat in place of his eyes, and half of his jaw was an arc of brushed steel.
Spika looked around at his officers and then at Kader. Major Hexil stood next to her.
‘Proceed,’ said Spika.
Kader paused for a second.
‘There are details of this mission that are sequestered and cannot be revealed.’
‘My experience is that there are rarely missions when you get the whole story,’ said Spika. A murmur of nervous laughter flitted through the room. ‘Let’s start with what you have brought onto my ship.’
Miletus noticed Major Hexil shift and glance at the commissar. Kader kept her gaze on Spika.
‘You are aware that the enemy action on Verghast was initiated and commanded by one of the Archenemy’s high warlords.’
‘By the Heritor Asphodel, may his soul and works burn for all eternity.’
‘Just so, and that the Heritor brought with him to war not only armies enslaved to his will, but weapons and devices of war.’
‘War engines, corrupted Mechanicus battle machines,’ said Spika.
Kader shook her head. ‘The Heritor did not only corrupt. He created. Devices and artifices that fuse machine and the warp, and even flesh. Some the size of Titans, some no larger than a bullet casing. No two are the same, but all of them possess immense capacity for destruction. The Militarum have a name for them…’
‘Woe machines,’ said Hexil.
The officers looked at the Urdeshi major.
‘Devilish things of infinite malice and cunning.’
‘The Heritor Asphodel fell…’ said Spika.
‘He did,’ said Kader. ‘But his woe machines still exist, and we do not know how many he created, or for what purposes.’
‘I think I understand,’ said Spika. His face was grave. ‘You have got hold of some of these woe machines, and they are now sitting in the hangar bay of my ship.’
Kader nodded. ‘Three of them. All were destroyed in the battle. Our associates in the Mechanicus salvaged them and rendered them inert so that they could be transported to a forge enclave and analysed.’
‘For what purpose?’ asked Spika.
‘For victory. More than that you may not know, and I cannot say.’
‘If they were destroyed, why the extra security measures?’ asked the white-haired Master of Artifice.
‘We do not know the full purpose of the Heritor’s creations, nor their capabilities. Some can suborn other machines, others mask their true purpose, all are lethal. Additionally, there is the matter of knowledge and contingency. If the Archenemy knows what we are doing, they will try to stop us. Then there is the question of moral threat…’
‘Moral threat?’ asked Spika.
‘To know is to be vulnerable. This is the high malefic artifice – it threatens even by its presence.’
‘And if we go down, what is one more old mistress of war lost on the tides?’
‘The Highness Ser Armaduke will not be alone. Two other vessels also loaded with specimens will join it for the voyage. They will watch us. We them. This cargo must reach its destination, even if only in part.’
‘And if there is a sign of malefic influence, or if the containment of these hopefully dead devices fails, then we burn each other from the void.’
‘Just so,’ said Kader, and she took a thick packet of parchment from the inside pocket of her coat. Miletus noticed the crests of the Fleet Admiral’s Cadre and the Commissariat on the thick, red seals.
Kader slid the packet across the table to Spika.
‘This is a new order tasking and operating procedure. It covers the particulars of what I have just outlined.’
Spika broke the seals, eyes moving across the loops of quilled sentences and punch-printed data.
‘Major Hexil is in command of the security of the specimens and is under my command. He and I will coordinate with your crew over wider ship security.’
Spika was turning the pages of the order tasking. Miletus did not need to know the man well to know that he was less than happy – furious, more like, but still controlled.
‘Any deviation or failure will be met with immediate and maximum censure,’ said Kader.
‘Break this down and issue orders ship-wide as needed,’ said Spika, handing the parchment to his first officer. ‘Any slip up and I will shoot the bilge slime responsible myself.’ He turned his gaze back on Hexil and Kader. ‘My thanks for your forthrightness, commissar. The Highness Ser Armaduke is ready to serve.’
Kader gave a clipped nod, Hexil a salute, and they moved towards the door.
‘Get to it,’ said Spika to the officers around him, ‘and make damned sure this is done by the numbers. Dismissed.’
A scattering of salutes and Miletus suddenly found that he was the only one standing still. He came to attention as Spika moved towards him.
‘Sir, Third Lieutenant Cern reporting.’
Spika kept walking. ‘Dalbract!’ he called.
The sergeant-at-arms by the door saluted.
‘Third Lieutenant Cern is attached to your section, for the voyage. Mister Cern, your order is to keep your eyes open and your bones out of trouble and to do whatever Dalbract advises you as if he were the voice of Saint Sabbat herself.’
‘Aye, shipmaster,’ said Miletus, saluting again as Spika moved away. He looked around to see the sergeant-at-arms grinning at him. His teeth were black and silver pegs.
‘Best follow me, sir.’
VERGHAST – SYSTEM EDGE
‘No, sir. Stop. Fasten it like that and the moment the helmet pressurises it will crush your neck.’
Miletus’ hands went still on the heavy brass catches. Dalbract’s hands, bulked by gloves, reached up and moved Miletus’ fingers into place.
They were in an arms locker, three decks down from the bridge in the Highness Ser Armaduke’s command castle. Like the rest of the ship, and the command areas in particular, the arms locker had an air of worn and cracked grandeur at odds with the ship�
�s modest role. The weapon racks were wooden, the major supports carved with eagles that hid scraps of gilt in the folds of their feathers. The gear, too, was old – the stocks of guns worn; armour and pressure suits patched, or clearly unserviceable, but still touched with the markers of a brash opulence: silk and velvet washed of colour, starburst and aquila studs on scabbards worn like the prize ribbons of an old show brawler in a travelling fete. Gaudy reminders of youth now battered down to slow muscles, bones webbed with fractures that would never heal, fists driven by stubbornness rather than strength.
Dalbract stood back. ‘Try now.’
Miletus obeyed, and felt the collar cinch tight as the catches snapped closed. From just below his neck to his groin was now carapaced in plasteel and brass. The battered emblem of a woman with two faces – one set in iron, the other in gold – sat on the cuirass in high relief. Snake scales ringed the high collar that the helm would lock into. Miletus rolled his shoulders. The armour was heavy, but not uncomfortable.
‘I have never seen pressure gear like this,’ he said.
‘Not many have now,’ said Dalbract, taking a helm from a rack. ‘Here, the serpent of the deep, to watch where you can’t.’
He held out a pressure helm with a crystal visor-slit set in a dome of brushed steel. A ridge shaped like a snake ran along the helm’s crown, its head to the back, so that it would snarl behind whoever wore it. Miletus took it and looked for a mag-clamp point on his armour.
‘Hook it here,’ said Dalbract, tapping a loop at the base of Miletus’ back. ‘Won’t come loose. It’s a good friend this set, never had a soul die in it.’
Miletus looked at Dalbract. ‘What?’
‘It’s lucky, and you’re lucky to wear it – not many serpent suits left now. The Armaduke looks after those she knows, and she knows that the body in this gear is fighting for her and the Throne, so she will look after you.’
Miletus blinked. He had been on ships before, of course, even been aboard the battleship Aquilis Rex when it was in harbour. He knew that ships acquired traditions and quirks of culture. On the monitor ship he had served on as a cadet, the crew muttered the name of Saint Sabbat three times each time the engines changed pitch. This, though, felt deeper, older, as though the Highness Ser Armaduke wore a crust of its own history, like an old sea creature with a shell of barnacles and flotsam. He looked at the two faces on his chestplate.
‘This is not the emblem of the ship,’ said Miletus.
‘Oh, they are of the ship, sir, they just don’t sit on its banners. This…’ Dalbract pointed at each half of the two faces on Miletus’ cuirass. ‘That’s her, our Highness herself. Eyes to see to port and starboard and twin voices of thunder. Two sisters, you see, living as one, each looking the way the other can’t, back to back, broadside to broadside. As long as they don’t quarrel, they can never die, but sometimes they do. Two souls you see, one older, one younger. The old bitter and jealous, and with teeth made of broken cannons. The younger all fire and glory and golden dreams. We stand in between and just hope the two faces can make peace when it comes to it.’
‘Ship stories…’ said Miletus.
‘Not stories,’ said Dalbract, his forehead creasing above his augmetic eyes. ‘These are memories. Older a ship gets, the more memories it has, and the Armaduke, she has a lot of memories. Now, to arms.’
Dalbract pulled a heavy pistol off a rack, checked the open breech and action, then held it out. Miletus checked the breech.
‘Clear, and accepted,’ Miletus said, and took the pistol. It was heavy, the barrel a square-edged block of worn metal. The wooden grip gleamed with a patina of use and gun oil.
Dalbract held out a carton of filled magazines, each one a block the size of Miletus’ fist. ‘Blast rounds – from that beauty they will tear through anything that’s close enough for you to see. One for the gun and the rest to carry.’
Miletus nodded, tucking magazines into pouches. ‘I…’ he began, then bit his lip.
He looked up. Dalbract was looking at him. Miletus could have sworn there was a glimmer of humour in the sergeant-at-arms’ augmetic eyes.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘I am not an arms specialist. I mean, I have done the basics, but…’
‘But why has the shipmaster given you to an old sergeant-at-arms and put you with the hard cases of this crew, who will have some great and bloody work to do if this voyage goes sidewise?’
‘Yes,’ said Miletus.
‘Because you have to learn, and there is no way to learn like doing.’ He took down a heavy, cylindrical melta charge and handed it to Miletus. ‘The old and the barely born, that’s what the Armaduke gets as crew now, when it gets new crew at all. Even Spika – he’s here because he has run his rope to near the knot. The Armaduke is a warrior that has outlived her time. So she gets what’s left. Shipmaster does not like that. He likes to fight, what he was made for, just like her. He helms a fighting ship, and if you are going to show you can fight, or learn how, there is no better place than as close as you can get without being a shell in a gun.’
Dalbract turned to another weapon rack, looked along it and then took down a short sword with a broad, single-edged blade. He held the blade out, along with a battered scabbard.
‘Keep close, sir, let the serpents watch your back. Do that and the Highness Ser Armaduke will see you safe.’
Miletus took the blade and buckled it on.
A high note slid through the air, trembling. Miletus winced involuntarily. The sound dipped lower, sinking into the walls. One of the blades in the weapon rack whined in harmony. Dalbract reached out and touched the blade to quiet it, then touched his eyes and mouth.
‘Shadows keep your sharpness to yourself,’ he muttered, the phrase delivered with the rote tone of a prayer. He moved towards the door. ‘They have lit her warp engines, sir. The shipmaster will want us on the bridge for translation to the sea-o-souls.’
Miletus followed him, feeling the weight of armour that no one had yet died in heavy on his shoulders.
It took time for the warp engines to spool up to translation readiness. Miletus thought of it as like a rope being wound into tension. Lights dimmed, even though they had not been adjusted. Distortion edged console displays. Exchanges of words between the bridge crew became shorter, words slightly hushed. A subtle vibration crept into every surface. When he briefly touched a guard rail, he could feel his teeth buzzing.
He remembered what Dalbract had said as they had hurried along a companionway towards the bridge, the paint on its walls worn to metal at shoulder height.
‘The Armaduke has old bones – ghost bones – old before even she was set into the void, bones taken from the dead.’
‘What? She was made for the Khulan Wars,’ said Miletus. ‘I read her commissioning record. Her and a dozen like her.’
‘She was, but those were times of fire and loss, and the forges were starving for want of ore. So they took the bones from the dead, pulled them from wreckers’ yards, even from the warp flotsam. Melted some, worked other parts, spliced old and new together, and sent them back to fight with dead bones and ghosts in their hearts.’
‘There was nothing about that in the records. I read them all.’
‘Not in the ink scratch records, but the Armaduke remembers. Listen sometimes and you can hear the old ghosts sing. They like to fight, and so does she. They remember what it was like to die, you see.’
‘Two ship signatures active in auspex range,’ the Officer of Detection called. Miletus blinked. He had found himself drifting, as though the rising hum of the warp engines had tugged him out onto a tide of his own thoughts. ‘Both converging on us. Hull and energy readings match our convoy. They are hailing us.’
‘Answer and begin mutual code authentication,’ said Spika. The shipmaster was in his chair, hoisted midway between the floor and the sensorium dome in the ceiling. The articulated limb could move him to any station, or up into the dome. Currently he was situated at a point be
tween all possibilities, face set. He had not spoken more than three words since Dalbract and Miletus had come onto the bridge.
‘Shipmaster’s not happy,’ Dalbract had said as they had approached the bridge. ‘Best keep silent unless he issues you an order.’
‘He is upset about the mission?’
‘The mission is what it is – it’s the rest. Secrets, politics, the Commissariat’s gun at the back of our heads. He likes to see what he is fighting, does Spika.’
Miletus had listened to the advice, and other than saluting when he came onto the bridge, he had held to the side of the command platform with Dalbract and the armsmen security contingent.
‘Handshakes complete and code identification complete,’ said the Officer of Detection. The blank-eyed servitors around him were twitching and mumbling in static. ‘It’s them. Signatures and codes verify.’
‘Very good,’ said Spika. ‘Helm, bring us into convergence and start to synchronise for warp translation.’ Spika keyed a control and brought his chair around to the main pict screen. ‘Visual feed, let’s have a look at them.’
A brass-fingered servitor clattered the keys of a console. Static buzzed across the screen then settled into an image of stars and void that flexed as it focused and settled. They were on the edge of the Verghast System, almost at the Mandeville point where they could punch into the other-realm of the warp. The system’s star was now just the brightest dot in a glittering field of night. Two warships slid through the dark towards the Highness Ser Armaduke. Both were of a size with her. Data bracketed their images on the screen, giving their designation and details. The Lights Excelling was a Claymore-class corvette, its hull a block of batteries behind a blunt prow. The second wore the name Cold Steel. A Turbulent-class heavy frigate, it was the largest of the three.
SABBAT WAR Page 29