The hangar lights were still lit. The three litters holding the remains of the woe machines lay just where they had. Stasis fields buzzed above each of them, fizzing with the incense smoke drifting from the burners the Mechanicus priests had set atop poles.
‘Where are they?’ asked Miletus, voicing the question that filled his head as he looked across the hangar. The Urdeshi troops were not there, neither were the tech-priests or their battle servitors. Just the litters and the buzzing domes of energy. All stillness. All peaceful. He looked at them… Blinked.
‘Vedrok? Cazzim?’ called Hexil. ‘Respond and confirm.’
There was no answer. The armsmen had formed a crescent gun line trained on the litters and their stasis shrouds. They edged forwards. Miletus’ eyes were moving across the banks of equipment, and power feeds…
He could see what lay beneath the fields now, clearer than when they had slid from the belly of the lifter. He could look at them quite easily. There was nothing to be afraid of. No sharp-shadows or ghosts from Dalbract’s questionable history of the ship, just collections of objects, laid out, heaped like badly curated exhibits in a museum. The nearest one looked like a vast, broken cartwheel without a machine to make it turn. Bits of articulated metal, and cables; pale pieces that might have been bone but could have been plastek or ceramic. Fine, soft tubes, leaking out from under a twisted gouge in its spokes, like hair, like the fronds of something that billowed in the currents of a lightless sea.
The second might have been the image of a gigantic human sculpted out of lead, its body blown into components. The weapons unleashed on it must have been terrifying. A crust of vitrified dust clung to it. On the lump that might have been its head, a single blue crystal circle sat in a saw-toothed setting.
The furthest one looked like a casket, or perhaps a coffin, though there was no sign of a seam or lid. Its mass was made entirely of interlocking brass levers and cogs. Some of the smallest cogwheels had been smashed or melted.
Was it a lock? he found himself wondering, one great lock holding something within? When he looked at the pattern made by the toothed wheels and levers, they began to remind him of faces… of eyes and brows and teeth.
Hexil turned to Dalbract. ‘This is not secure. Send the runner message now – cargo not secure.’
‘Lieutenant Cern is officer commanding, major.’
‘Send the order!’ growled Hexil.
Miletus did not respond. He was looking at the litters.
‘Send the order, you stupid child!’
‘Calm down, sir,’ said Dalbract, stepping closer to the major, gun lowered.
He heard the snap of a safety being released. His head turned around. Hexil had his blitzgun raised, aim steady on Dalbract. The sergeant-at-arms was very still. Miletus blinked. He found himself shaking his head. Something had clicked over in his mind. He was calm. Calmer than he had been on the bridge with Spika and the rest.
Peaceful. It was so peaceful here. Not like the dreams, not like the spaces with shadows and memories of this old ship sailing towards her death. He wanted it to be peaceful. He did not want to do anything with the fact that he had noticed the power feeds to one of the stasis litters had been disconnected, that whatever field was covering the thing beneath it was not a stasis field, that Hexil was right – the cargo was not secure. He could feel his mouth working, could hear something loud rising from inside him. He didn’t want that. He wanted peace. He wanted quiet, but the sound was roaring up his throat, like steam pouring from a blown valve.
‘Run,’ he heard himself gasp.
The stasis field around the coffin-shaped woe machine collapsed like a soap bubble in the wind. Frost flashed across the deck. Miletus fell, gasping. Nausea and pain exploded in the space left by the false peace that had poured into his head.
Dalbract opened up. His blast gun breathed a cone of muzzle flame across the hangar. Shots hit the woe machine. Brass cogs and tiny levers tore free. The air around it was shimmering like heat haze about a fire. Mirage images swam in its halo: hands, feathers, chains and cogs and teeth. Abscesses of blackness formed and burst in the air. Some of the armsmen were firing. Others were on the ground, vomit spattering the visors of their pressure helms.
Hexil did not flinch but aimed, tucking his blitzgun close. He fired. The flechettes hit the woe machine dead centre. They punched through levers and cogs, tearing into its heart. Hexil kept firing, drilling the wound deeper into the fragmenting brass. A cacophony of splintering metal melded with gunfire. Miletus saw the thing judder in mid-air, trembling. Hexil’s fire paused as he snapped the magazine free from his gun. The armsmen kept hammering it. Shots burst over it. Miletus aimed his heavy pistol. Hexil clicked a fresh magazine in place and pulled the trigger of the blitzgun.
The woe machine turned inside out. Gears and levers meshed and turned and folded themselves through dimensions that were not there. Sound vanished. The gunfire, the ping-ring of falling cases, the sound of Miletus’ breath inside his mask – all gone, all drained into unbeing. The lights blew out, sparks and glass tumbling. Frost spread across Miletus’ helm visor. He could taste something, something rank and heavy, thick with warmth and iron, like air released from a punctured gut. He could not see, but there was something there – something pulsing in the blackness in front of him. Then the flash of gunfire, strobing, the percussive bang of each shot a silent jolt through the air.
Then he saw it.
A silent blackness unfolding towards them, like a symmetrical ink blot poured into the air. In each flash it had changed, and he felt the snap-fire of memories in his head with each blinked image: a flayed equine head, angel wings, a face screaming, a broken cup, open hands.
He pulled the trigger of his pistol. The recoil spun him. Hexil was still firing, backing up, lit by the spit of fire from his gun. Miletus aimed his pistol again, braced. The cloud of darkness was almost on Hexil, extending in shutter blinks, coiling. All without sound, all within touching, all so distant.
Miletus fired. Flash, bright orange against a curdled blackness. The muzzle flare from Hexil’s gun vanished. Miletus fired again, shouting, the sounds coming empty from his throat. The darkness was right there, above him, stretching up and out, like a storm wave cresting before breaking. He heard something then, a single sound in a universe of silence: the clicking whir of tiny gears and brass teeth, like cogwork winding too fast through final slices of time.
A gun spat into the dark from next to him. A hand grabbed his shoulder, and then he was stumbling, breathing. Dalbract was behind him, shoving him back, turning to fire another burst. Miletus felt the hardness of a wall, saw the shape of a hatch release wheel. There were other people next to him, hands reaching to spin the wheel. The hatch opened. Bodies surged through. Miletus turned just as Dalbract came through behind him and slammed the hatch shut. He pushed Miletus, and now they were running headlong through the sputtering light of a narrow companionway. There were three armsmen with them. Sound stuttered in Miletus’ ears: deck plates ringing under running feet, panting breath.
‘Keep moving!’ shouted Dalbract, and the shout was almost shocking in its clarity. The sergeant-at-arms had released the visor in his helm so that he could speak.
‘What–’ Miletus began, between gasps.
‘We have to get word to the bridge, sir.’
‘The hangar is sealed.’
‘Think doors and hatches will hold that thing for long?’
As if in answer, the lights in the passage dimmed and sputtered. A sound like countless tiny sharp edges scratching across metal buzzed through the air.
One of the armsmen raised his gun.
‘Move, sir!’
They were at a ladder. The armsmen ahead of him already had the hatch at the top open.
The sound of crumpling metal echoed down the passageway behind them. Miletus felt a blast wave buffet him. The gust smelled of cold metal and stagnant water. He grabbed the ladder and started to climb, hand over hand, gasping. Frost w
as forming on the rungs and his fingers as he climbed. Blackness rushed up the companionway as lights blew out. He could hear silence dragging at the sound of his breath, and behind it the whirring, cogwork clicking. Dalbract was just below him. He heard the sergeant-at-arms growl a stream of curses that vanished into nothing. They were not going to make it.
Blackness overtook him. The clicking was all around him. He tried to scream as he kept climbing.
Then the sound of cogs was a fading murmur in the passage beneath them, and the silence drained to the sound of his own gasping breaths. The beam of a stablight shone from beneath him. Dalbract looked up at him from next to the beam.
‘What just happened?’ asked Miletus.
‘Don’t know, sir, but it didn’t seem to think our skins were that important to it any more. It’s got somewhere more important to get to.’
‘Where?’
‘No word?’ said Kader.
‘Give them time,’ replied Spika. He saw the muscle in the commissar’s jawline flicker. She was nervous, he realised. ‘They have time – minutes, by the count of the chron.’
‘Not long,’ said Kader.
Spika opened his mouth to argue.
‘Shipmaster!’ called the Master of Materium. Spika and Kader turned. ‘Output fluctuating in the Geller field.’
Spika swung his chair across the platform to above the Master of Materium and her station. The gilded fingers of system servitors were dancing across control keys. Incense-laden steam vented from data-valves. The Master of Materium’s eyes were pressed into a brass data-viewer.
‘Details,’ said Spika.
‘Attempting to resolve,’ said the Master of Materium. ‘The field is holding, but something is interfering with its waveform.’
‘Interfering how?’
‘It’s a semi-rhythmic distortion pattern that is causing waveform reality fluctuation through the field envelope.’ She straightened from the data-viewer. Inside the brass collar, oscillating blue lines pulsed across a convex screen. ‘It’s making a sound in the warp.’
She pulled a lever, and a sound came from the vox-horn next to Spika. Static and distortion growled and hissed through the air. It rolled and rose, the scratching sound curling over and exhaling into a long scratching note, then tumbling down and up again.
‘It’s like a… like a…’ began the Master of Materium.
‘It’s like a call,’ said Spika.
‘Cut the beacon signal to the other ships!’ shouted Kader.
‘We can’t,’ said the signals officer. ‘The beacon signal is synchronised and meshed with the Geller field rhythm. We don’t have control of it any more.’
For a second, there was just the sound of buzzing systems and the low hum of the ship’s hull.
‘Full alert,’ called Spika. ‘Ship-wide.’
‘It’s damaged,’ Miletus heard himself breathe.
‘Sir?’ asked Dalbract.
Miletus nodded.
‘It took out the units guarding it, but when it took fire from us, it fled. It was taken from a battlefield – it must have taken a lot of damage for us to think it was dead. God-Emperor knows what capabilities it has, but it fled rather than finish us. It’s like an animal. It’s trying to get back to its own element, to feed, to heal.’
‘The sea-o’-souls,’ said Dalbract.
‘That means the Geller fields,’ said Miletus. For a second, he found himself wondering if he believed what he was saying, but something about that moment in the hangar where the woe machine had drowned his senses and thoughts in peace had run through him, like a current. He could feel… something – ideas and thoughts thrown up from the churn and spray. ‘Get to the shipmaster,’ he said to one of the armsmen. ‘Inform him that one of the woe machines is loose on the ship, that it is making for the Geller field generators, and that we are en route there now. Give him our strength and the casualty information.’
The armsman stood there for a second. Miletus could see her blinking behind the visor of her helm. Perhaps she was still in shock. Perhaps she just wanted to hear an order from someone other than a green third lieutenant. Perhaps she realised that what he was saying meant there was a good chance the ship was going down. She began to look at Dalbract.
Fresh alarms began to sound. Red warning lights flashed. Through his boots, Miletus felt a shiver in the bones of the ship.
‘Go! Now!’ he shouted, and the armsman began to run.
Miletus looked at Dalbract. ‘The Geller field generatorium?’ he asked.
‘Five decks down. We take the main port hoist. Fastest way there.’
‘You have the lead,’ said Miletus. He was damned sure that the only command he had here was because of his rank, but Spika had put Dalbract and the Wyrmyr with him to make sure that the job was done. Miletus was not going to go against that intent.
‘Very good, sir,’ said the sergeant-at-arms, and gave a series of gestures to the remaining armsmen. They began to run.
Miletus fell in behind Dalbract. A strange sense of calm had come over him. This was nothing like the combat exercises he had been through as a cadet. It was nothing like the accounts he had read of the great admirals and captains of Battlefleet Pacificus. It was something far simpler, the truth that all the stories and accounts tried to communicate, but could not – a simple choice: to let fear drown you, or to embrace it, to go beyond, to fight in spite of fear.
‘Do you have any idea about how we few might kill it?’ asked Dalbract.
‘No, but we are watched over by the God-Emperor and his Highness Ser Armaduke – something will occur. A serpent of light or perhaps an angel of the deeps come to pull us back to the light.’
‘Just so, sir!’ called Dalbract, and they ran on into the red light and the sound of alarms.
‘Exit the warp,’ said Kader.
‘Negative,’ called the Master of Etherics. ‘The Geller field governors are locked – we can’t begin the synchronisation rights with the warp engines.’
‘Commissar,’ said Spika, his voice controlled, but loud enough to ring clear over the alarms. ‘You will not issue orders on this deck.’
Kader whirled to him. He saw her hand snap the clasp free on the bolt pistol at her waist. He met her gaze.
‘The situation has gone past your protocols. What we have to do now is very simple – we have to fight until we win. For that, you need to let me and this ship do what we exist to do.’
Kader looked like she was about to argue.
A buzzing shriek rose from the vox-horns across the bridge. The servitors wired into the signal machines went into spasm. The sound trembled, ululating. The tech-adepts and enginseers on the bridge raised their hands, calling out in binharic, trying to shout down the cacophony. Incense billowed out. Spika flinched despite himself. The sound rose to a peak, boring into his ears. Via his data-links to the ship he could feel her systems shiver. Then the sound vanished.
‘All stations, report,’ he called. The bridge crew were reeling, dazed.
‘Geller field controls still locked,’ came the first reply.
‘Warp engines engaged, but locked.’
‘Signal control re-established,’ called the signals officer. ‘Shipmaster, our security beacon failed to transmit two pulses.’
Before Spika could reply, red lights flared on the machine consoles around the signals officer. Signal waves flicked over the screens around him, oscillating into flat lines.
‘Shipmaster, energy and sensor spikes on the Lights Excelling. It’s going to fire on us!’
The lights began to fail as the hoist descended.
Flicker-snap… Flicker-snap…
The temperature dropped. Miletus’ breath misted in the air, a white cloud in the blink of light. In the blink, he saw Dalbract put his hand on the twin faces on his chestplate and then touch the serpent crest on his helm. He was muttering.
Flicker-snap… Flicker-snap…
‘Two sisters…’ said Miletus, hearing the forced stren
gth in his own voice. ‘The story of the Highness Ser Armaduke being two sisters – it’s about the wreck material used to help make the ship, isn’t it. There are no faces, no souls pulling in different directions, just a story made from simple facts.’
Dalbract looked around at him, his scowl visible in a blink of light.
‘Stories are truer than facts, lad, every one of them.’ He banged the two faces on the cuirass.
The hoist platform lurched. The light blinked off, then blazed back on. The servitor manning the brass hoist controls was caught in a spasming loop, arcs of electro-charge running from the levers to its hands. Miletus caught a gust of ozone-filled air as the hoist lurched to a stop, gears jammed. The top half of a passage opened at knee height. A stencilled deck code sat above it. The servitor had collapsed into a heap of limbs and pistons.
Quiet. Very quiet. No hull vibration or sound of air-cycling systems.
‘We’re here,’ said Dalbract. ‘Let’s not wait for things to get worse.’ He dropped through the space.
The other armsmen looked at Miletus. He took a breath, then followed.
His feet hit the deck. It was dark, as though the light blazing on in the hoist shaft was part of another world. Dalbract’s helm-mounted stablight reached into the distance. Miletus cursed himself for not having turned his own on before jumping.
‘Watch your feet,’ said Dalbract.
The armsmen dropped down behind Miletus as he lit his helm light. The beam touched the walls and ceiling. They gleamed with hair-fine scratches, rivets ground down to nubs, cable bundles flayed of insulation. He heard a faint splash as he took a step. He looked down.
They had seen no crew on the way here. Most had been cleared from the spaces close to the hangar holding the woe machines, but down here, on a primary engineering deck, there should have been ratings, tech-adepts, servitors…
Miletus felt his gorge rise.
‘Whatever it did to the guards in the hangar… it wasn’t hanging around here to clean up,’ said Dalbract, his voice low. ‘The sea-o’-souls be kind to them that go to its depths.’
SABBAT WAR Page 31