‘I… yes…’ Adibh said, struggling for focus. ‘Just before… before…’
‘Then come, we cannot linger here.’ Kyuhai turned away, ducking under the seats that hung from the inverted roof like stalactites. Through the smoke-filled gloom Adibh saw that the others had been much less fortunate. Fai’sahl lay beside her, a spar of metal jutting from his chest. Daukh was on the cabin’s far side, slumped against the hatch, the top of his head mashed into a ragged crown of blood and bone. The timekeeper was sprawled brokenly across the drive panel, his robes smouldering.
‘Tread carefully,’ Kyuhai cautioned as he stepped over the gaping fissure running through the floor. Choking on the smoke, Adibh moved to follow. As she climbed over Fai’sahl’s body his eyes opened.
‘Adibh… what…?’ His words splintered into a blood-flecked cough and he clutched at her. She took his hand instinctively, gripping it as spasms rippled through his body. The predator she’d glimpsed earlier was gone, along with its baleful magnetism.
In death he is only himself, she sensed.
‘The emissary still lives!’ she shouted to Kyuhai.
‘His injury is mortal,’ the Seeker replied. ‘You cannot help him.’ Reaching the hatch, he heaved Daukh aside and tugged at the opening lever, but it wouldn’t budge.
As the emissary’s convulsions subsided Adibh leaned in close. ‘The Cog Eternal,’ she urged. ‘What is it? The truth, Fai’sahl.’
‘Told you… truth,’ he wheezed as his eyes clouded. ‘Greatest… good…’ His head fell back, revealing a circular scar under his chin.
‘That is a lie,’ Adibh said sadly. ‘But I don’t believe it is yours, old friend.’
She released Fai’sahl’s hand and crawled towards the Seeker. As she approached the fissure an electronic burbling sounded from somewhere below. Her drone. She leant over the rift’s lip and reached down, expecting to touch the ground, but there was nothing. The car must have come to rest above a cavity. She stretched further and her fingers brushed smooth metal.
‘Seeker, I–’
A cold blue light flared into life below, dazzling her. She jerked away, but something seized her wrist in a vicelike grip.
‘Do not be alarmed,’ a sterile voice boomed. ‘Your security is my primary directive.’
Adibh shrieked as the Warden yanked her through the fissure.
‘Watchmen. Heading this way, shas’el,’ Voyle warned as a group of robed figures appeared on the road ahead.
‘You must delay them,’ Akuryo ordered.
‘Yes, shas’el.’ What else was there to say? They could not abandon an Ethereal. After the crash they’d climbed to the stranded car, where the Fire Warrior was wrestling with the hatch while Voyle covered the road. It hadn’t taken long for more of the Order’s troops to arrive, but as they drew closer he saw there was something new among them – something much larger. He sighted down his scope and grimaced. The hulking figure was swathed in the customary purple robes, but it was almost twice the height of its fellows. A bulbous helmet encased its head and shoulders, locked into place by heavy chains that criss-crossed its chest. Its visor was carved into the likeness of a cog, with a single lens at the centre and smoking censers affixed to each tooth. The giant’s right arm split at the elbow, spawning a pair of armoured tentacles that were wrapped around the haft of a massive industrial hammer. Its right arm was a weapon in its own right, bulging into a serrated claw that dragged along the ground behind it.
They’ve given up on hiding their secrets, Voyle thought, targeting the cog-faced hulk. As his plasma bolts seared its helmet the giant swung its hammer up to protect its lens, almost as if it had read his mind. Moving like clockwork, the watchmen raised their rifles and retaliated with a volley of bullets, then stepped aside, opening a path for their champion.
I can’t put that thing down, Voyle realised as the behemoth broke into a lumbering charge. This is where I die.
‘Then lower your weapon… and live,’ the Voice suggested, slithering into his thoughts like a shameful secret. It spoke fluently now, its words redolent with sombre authority. Voyle couldn’t remember why he had ever questioned it.
‘Because you were lost, child.’
There was a metallic creak behind him. Voyle turned unsteadily and saw Kyuhai emerge from the vehicle.
‘I will assist the others, Seeker,’ Akuryo said, his voice seeming to come from some distant, meaningless place.
‘They are gone,’ Kyuhai said.
‘Por’el Adibh…’
‘All of them, Stormlight.’
The Ethereal turned to Voyle, as if to speak. Instead he moved, whipping a metal tube from his belt and whirling it towards the dazed man. It elongated from both ends as it swept through the air, its telescoped segments snapping free with a staccato burst of clicks. In the heartbeat it took to complete its arc it had become a staff. It struck Voyle’s helmet and threw him off balance. As he fell against the vehicle he saw the Seeker twirl the weapon back then thrust it forward – into the visor of the giant that had climbed up behind Voyle while the Voice held sway. The blunt tip shattered the mutant’s cyclopean lens and drove through to whatever lay below.
‘Mont’ka!’ the Seeker shouted and the behemoth shuddered as the staff’s blades sprang free inside its skull. Kyuhai twisted the weapon then wrenched it free, tearing away the creature’s visor, along with most of its face. As the giant toppled backwards Voyle glimpsed a protean morass of tendrils and broken bones inside its helm. Kyuhai leapt back into cover as the watchmen answered their champion’s death with a salvo of bullets.
‘Your actions have invited great danger, gue’vesa’ui,’ he said to Voyle.
‘Yes, Seeker,’ Voyle answered, lowering his head. ‘I–’
‘Later.’ Kyuhai whirled his staff and it contracted back into a tube. ‘We must go.’
‘Support team, your status?’ Akuryo transmitted as they retreated down the mound with Voyle bringing up the rear.
‘The truck is clear,’ Erzul replied. ‘Do you need us, shas’el?’
‘Negative. We are en route to you now.’
The Voice almost had me, Voyle thought as he followed the two xenos.
‘Child, you must–’
‘No!’ Voyle hissed, biting his lip until he drew blood. ‘Get out… of my head.’ But now that it had tasted his soul he knew it never would.
– THE INVISIBLE CIRCLE –
UNITY
Shas’vre Bhoral triggered the jetpack of her Crisis battlesuit and launched herself into the air, arcing high above the spaceport. Ensconced within the control cocoon of the hulking machine, protected by multiple layers of angular nanocrystal armour, she felt invulnerable. It had been many years since her duties had called upon her to wear the battlesuit in combat, but the old discipline had returned the instant she’d activated the machine and its sensors had interfaced with her nervous system, transforming her into a towering bipedal tank.
It has been too long, she thought fiercely.
As she neared the city’s dome she cut her thrusters and plunged back towards the spaceport, confident in her armour’s durability. She came down hard, pulverising an enemy warrior under her massive piston-like legs and sending tremors through the ground. Triggering the flamethrower attached to her suit’s right arm she spun at the waist, washing the dead guard’s comrades in a whooshing arc of fire. Their robes were scorched away in seconds, revealing the misshapen forms beneath.
These are not common gue’la, Bhoral judged as one of the burning figures flailed at her with a scythe-like claw. A mutant strain perhaps?
She stomped over their charred corpses and fired a fusillade of plasma bolts with her secondary weapon, targeting the guards on the far side of the roof. A squadron of gun drones swept by overhead, their path guided by her battlesuit’s tactical system. The ship had carried eighty of the saucer-like
machines and Bhoral had activated them all when she had received the Seeker’s signal.
Mal’caor.
The word meant ‘spider’, but the code signified ‘a-great-peril-awakened’. The protocol for the situation was clear: ensure the ship’s safety at all costs. Accordingly Bhoral had launched a surprise attack on the port’s guards immediately, but they had reacted with uncanny swiftness and a total lack of fear.
‘They fight like machines,’ Bhoral observed as a pair of three-armed deviants broke cover and charged towards her. One sported a muscular tentacle, the other a chitinous appendage that ended in a snapping pincer. They were bigger and better armoured than the others she had encountered, their heads protected by sealed helmets bearing ribbed crests.
‘For… Greatest… Good!’ they hissed, their words slurring as if their mouths weren’t shaped for speech.
Before Bhoral could fire, a lanky avian figure sprang past her and raced to meet the mutants with a hooting cry. The Fire Warrior clicked her tongue with irritation as she recognised the kroot carnivore, though she had no idea which of the two it was. She had fought alongside the pair in service to the exalted Kyuhai for many years, yet she still couldn’t tell them apart.
‘The Yasu’caor forges strange bonds,’ the Seeker had instructed when she had joined his circle, ‘but it is their very strangeness that makes them strong.’
Bhoral’s suit chimed a warning as something landed on its blocky shoulders. A moment later the second kroot vaulted from its perch to join the fray. The carnivores whirled about the mutants in a feral dance – hacking, stabbing and feinting with their broad-bladed machetes then leaping away, always one step ahead of the ungainly mutants. Bhoral did not doubt the outcome of the contest, but her allies’ frivolity irked her.
‘The Seeker has taught you well,’ she observed, ‘but you remain beasts.’
She felt a twinge of pain as an explosive slug dented her battlesuit’s left arm. It was a sympathetic sensation generated by the suit’s cocoon, sharp enough to bind her to the machine, but not enough to distract her. Her sensors pinpointed the aggressor in moments – a sniper crouched in a tower to her left. An evaluation of the enemy’s capabilities flashed across her awareness, relayed by her battlesuit’s tactical system. The threat was minimal so she dispatched a pair of drones to eradicate it and continued her advance, leaving the frenzied kroot to their game.
The last of the guards had taken cover behind a cluster of machinery. Drones buzzed about them, kept at bay by the defenders’ disciplined volleys. Bhoral strode towards their position, pinning them down with a hail of plasma bolts as she approached. When she was in range she scoured their shelter with fire.
‘Disharmony portends dissolution,’ she decreed, quoting the Yasu’caor as her enemies burned. She rotated her battlesuit, scanning the rooftop. The fighting was over. Even the kroot had finished their foes, though they were still hacking away at the corpses, jabbering at one-another as they tried to make sense of their outlandish victims. The Seeker had forbidden them from eating the dead, but their fascination could not be completely curtailed.
‘Forward perimeter is secure, shas’vre,’ a voice reported on her transmission link – Hurrell, the leader of the first gue’vesa support team. Something was playing havoc with their communications systems and the signal was badly distorted.
‘Confirmed, gue’vesa’ui,’ Bhoral replied.
‘I have three dead and three more wounded, shas’vre. Permission to evacuate them to the ship.’
‘Denied. Remain at your post.’
‘Baumann is in bad shape…’
‘I will despatch a salvation team to your position.’ Bhoral cut the link. The casualties were significant, but she didn’t share the Stormlight’s sentimentality towards the human auxiliaries. She was more concerned by the number of drones she’d lost; her strategic display recorded thirty-nine damaged or destroyed. When enemy reinforcements arrived the situation would rapidly become untenable.
She switched her transmitter to long range.
‘Seeker?’ Predictably she was met by the howling electronic whine that had flooded the channel shortly after the fighting commenced. Coming to a decision, Bhoral stomped back to the kroot. They looked up from their butchery as she loomed over them.
‘Bad meat,’ one of them grunted, holding up a glistening tentacle.
‘Eee-veel,’ its companion added sagely.
‘Enter the city,’ Bhoral commanded, speaking slowly. ‘Find our master.’
The carnivores exchanged a glance then sprang up and sprinted away.
It is almost as if they already know where he is, Bhoral mused. And maybe they did. She had reluctantly accepted that the savages’ bond with the Seeker was tighter – or perhaps deeper – than her own.
Her battlesuit’s strategic display bleeped as another drone’s signature went dark. She frowned as the rest of its squadron followed in rapid succession. Somewhere in the spaceport the enemy was still active. Bhoral checked the squadron’s last known location and hissed through her teeth. The hanger bay…
The truck rumbled along the dark streets, its headlights boring a tunnel through the gloom. Voyle was driving, with Erzul beside him; if anyone could retrace their outbound journey it was the squad’s pathfinder. The rest of the survivors were crouched in the back, their rifles levelled over the sides. The district was deserted, its citizen-slaves presumably banished to their hovels, but an expectant watchfulness pervaded the streets. Every one of the fugitives could sense it, t’au and human alike, but none as keenly as the Seeker.
The dissonance here runs deep, Kyuhai reflected, yet I have learnt nothing. Voyle sprang the trap too soon.
But was that really true? The threads of ambivalent fate had woven Ulver Voyle into this tangle. There was no reasoning behind it, for the firmament of reality was blind, but there was a rhythm to it. It was a Seeker’s path to listen and learn then tune the composition to serve the Greater Good, conducting events by intuition alone. And Kyuhai’s instincts had urged him to trust this broken gue’la. Perhaps Voyle had not sprung the trap too soon, but just in time.
‘Seeker, a question…’ the Fire Warrior crouched beside him began hesitantly.
‘Speak your mind, Stormlight,’ Kyuhai urged.
‘You are quite certain that Por’el Adibh was dead?’
‘I could not save her,’ Kyuhai said. I could not attempt it.
He had seen Adibh fall into the fissure – had even stepped forward to help her – then stopped when he’d heard the soulless voice booming from the rift and understood what lay beneath the wrecked car. The risk had been too great.
‘Her loss will not be without purpose,’ he promised.
‘As you say, Seeker.’ But there was no conviction in Akuryo’s voice.
Kyuhai could not share the Fire Warrior’s sorrow. Like love, hate and the myriad other shades of emotion that elevated or degraded his kin, sadness was a conceit he had transcended. That was what it meant to be yasu’aun.
‘The void within stands vigil against the void without,’ Kyuhai whispered to the lost city.
‘Take the right,’ Erzul instructed as the truck approached another junction.
She was always the best of us, Voyle thought, obeying. She should have been our gue’vesa’ui. Maybe the others would still be alive then.
‘You led them to ruin,’ the Voice agreed. ‘Because you are lost.’
It hadn’t let up throughout the escape, cajoling one moment then threatening the next, but mostly just wearing him down. The worst part was that he needed it now.
‘As I need you, Ulver. As do your kindred in the Cog Eternal.’
‘Why did you shoot the watchman?’ Voyle asked Erzul, trying to shut out his blessed tormentor. ‘Back at the manufactory when I ordered it – why did you obey?’
‘Because you are the gue’ve
sa’ui,’ Erzul answered without hesitation.
‘You trust me?’
‘Should I not?’
‘Not at all.’
‘I’ll warn you when to stop,’ Voyle said seriously.
‘Why did you order it?’ Erzul asked.
‘Because they’re monsters.’
‘The Imperium damns everything but itself as a monster,’ the Voice observed.
‘Sometimes that’s true.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Erzul said.
‘Sometimes the monsters are real.’
‘Then you are a monster too, Ulver Voyle.’
‘I know it.’ He spat, remembering the taste of rotten flesh. ‘What are you?’ He sensed he shouldn’t encourage the entity, but he had to know.
‘A traveller who became a god in service to a greater god. My children revere me as the Animus-Alpha.’
‘Why can I hear you?’
‘We share the same divine, star-spawned seed, though you are not of my blood. That is why you were invisible to me for so long.’
‘Voyle,’ Erzul said, eyeing him warily, ‘you’re not making any sense.’
‘What do you want with me?’ he pressed, ignoring her.
‘I offer you freedom, Ulver. Your masters have deceived you.’
‘That’s a lie.’
‘They are not liberators, but oppressors.’
‘They… saved me.’
‘They gelded you, body and soul. Have you felt any desire save obedience since they took you?’
‘It’s for the Greater Good,’ Voyle muttered, remembering the endless mantras of self-sublimation and the contentment the tranquillity wafers had brought. ‘Unity.’
‘Slavery!’ the Animus-Alpha corrected. And as Voyle recognised its truth, the invisible god slipped past his guard.
‘Turn left!’ Erzul snapped.
He turned right.
‘Voyle! What are–’ His left hand thrust out and grabbed her hair. Her instincts had always been razor sharp and she reacted quickly, snatching her combat knife free and swinging it towards him in the same motion. If he’d hesitated even a moment it might have been enough. But he didn’t hesitate. Before the blade could connect he rammed her face into the dashboard.
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