Belisarius Cawl- the Great Work - Guy Haley
Page 32
The drones covered its face, sealing it in a living sarcophagus, this time not to entrap, but to free.
Cawl continued his work, calling a flood of constructs from all parts of the mountain. He moved one of his left hands up and down like a conductor of music, and a great star map filled the space above them. Debris from the mountain fell through it in a steady rain.
‘Enough!’ cried Felix.
‘I would leave, if I were you,’ said Cawl. He pointed at one of the platforms being constructed by the drones. It was nearing completion. ‘Upon that platform a rift will shortly open. It will take you back to your ship.’
The swarm boiled around the C’tan. Slices of light cut through them. The C’tan howled in pain.
‘Quickly, now, it will be free in a moment, and then it will know I have betrayed it. I really do not think Zarhulash is going to be happy.’
‘Then you are true,’ said Felix.
‘Decimus, I am true,’ said Cawl in exasperation. ‘Zarhulash is going for a very long, one way trip. We don’t want it coming back.’
‘You knew this was going to happen!’
‘Knew, no – I am no psychic. Accurately predicted?’ He smiled modestly. ‘But of course.’
‘How are you going to get out? And you, Primus?’
‘So you do care!’ said Cawl. ‘I knew you did. Don’t worry about me. I am Belisarius Cawl. I can do anything.’
The drones withdrew from the ground. Five fresh, floating platforms glinted over the quantum engines. Steps held up by contra-gravity fields led to one of the smaller four. The largest, that in the centre, was directly below the C’tan.
Felix was frozen by indecision, then he made his choice.
‘Very well,’ he said, and ran for the platform Cawl had pointed out to him.
The mountain was dying. The quantum machines were failing. One exploded in a dazzling crash of green sparks, stabbing lightning into those nearest and causing them to detonate. The swarms of constructs were thinning. Giant lumps of blackstone rained down, narrowly missing the tetrarch, as he bounded up the floating stair to the platform. When he gained the top he slowed in astonishment. There appeared to be a gap in the air where part of the world had been excised. On the far side was the command deck of the Lord of Vespator. His crew stared at him.
‘Go through now!’ Cawl yelled over the growing clamour. ‘Or your ship will be destroyed!’
Felix marched to the edge of the rift. He looked at his crew. They looked back.
‘Tetrarch!’ one shouted, forgetting completely all protocol in his amazement.
‘I will destroy this mountain when I am aboard!’ Felix shouted.
Cawl spared him a quick smile. ‘I am rather counting on that, my dear Decimus.’
Felix took one last look at the quantum engine hall, which was now shaking itself to pieces. The swarms were failing; the green light dying in their eyes, they sank to the floor and moved no more. Dead necron constructs littered the place. The floor cracked as more lava welled up beneath it and spilled into the room.
The last sight Felix had was of Cawl framed by a rising tide of molten rock, and then the necron transit portal took the tetrarch, and threw him through time and space.
Cawl shut the rift behind him.
The distance between the ship and the Pharos seemed to be but a few feet. In reality, it was over five thousand miles. To Felix, it felt considerably more.
As he stepped through a force grabbed him and hurled him from the platform. He tumbled down corridors of moulded blackness shining with motes of light. Every point had a voice. They all screamed at him.
It seemed to go on for years, that sense of falling forwards, as stars and worlds and epochs sped by.
And then his foot clanged on metal as if he had taken but a single stride. He was on the command deck of his ship, stepping through as easily as if he had walked through a door. He turned around. The rift was closed.
‘Tetrarch,’ said Shipmaster Mirunus, with admirable cool. ‘Welcome back aboard.’
It took Felix a moment to steady himself. Reality seemed thin and strange, and he had to bend all his effort to force his mind back into the present. All his crew saw of his internal struggle was a moment of blankness, a setting of his lips, and then him heading straight to his podium. ‘Where are Cominus and the Chosen?’
‘They are coming in to docking bay six, my lord. The rest of the expedition is moving away from the Pharos,’ responded his master of operations.
‘The Pharos,’ Felix said. ‘Do you have firing solutions on the mountain?’ Serfs were hurrying forwards, seeing to his battlegear. His gun and power fist were taken from his arm. His helm was removed from his head. Cool ship air dried his sweat.
‘All weapons are locked and ready to fire, as per your order, my lord,’ reported the gunnery chief.
‘Broadcast these codes to the Zar Quaesitor,’ Felix said. ‘Inform their gunnery command to take aim on the mountain.’ He datapulsed Cawl’s digital seal to the relevant crew member and looked towards the oculus. The Pharos was erupting plumes of burning rock.
‘Open emergency vox-channel, all Imperial frequencies,’ he commanded. ‘Full power gain.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ a vox-operator said. ‘Open now.’
‘Tetrarch Felix to all forces on Sotha. Evacuate the mountain! All personnel to withdraw immediately to one hundred miles safe distance. Abandon Odessa Port. Withdraw. Gunnery,’ he said. ‘Stand by to unleash full firepower of this fleet.’
‘Weapons primed and ready to fire. Do you wish to give the command?’ his gunnery chief said.
Felix stared at the mountain.
‘My lord?’ the gunnery chief asked.
‘Hold until we have word of Cawl,’ said Felix.
‘We are reading a rapid increase in energy,’ his mistress of the augurs reported. ‘The mountain is becoming unstable. It will explode within ten minutes.’
A jet of fire burst from the side of the peak.
‘The Scythes of the Emperor’s fortress-monastery has collapsed, my lord,’ she said. ‘Readings are exceeding expected parameters. At this increase the device in the mountain will destroy the planet. I recommend we strike now.’
‘Hold,’ said Felix, his face set. ‘Await my command.’
‘About there, I think,’ Cawl said. He picked out a star in the green firmament projected by the Pharos. ‘And just in time.’
The drones around Zarhulash were sucked inwards, then exploded outwards in a shower of broken metal. Shrapnel whirred towards Cawl and Primus. His energy sheath turned them into flashes of bright light.
The humanoid form of Zarhulash was gone. In its stead blazed an orb of light. It touched Cawl and Primus, and they felt their souls shrivel.
You are trying to betray us, said Zarhulash. We see it!
‘In a word, yes,’ said Cawl, working feverishly over the alien console.
Disappointing. You have promise, said the ball of light. But expected. You will have nothing. You will die.
Cawl laughed. ‘I already have all I desire! I’ve inloaded it. All of it! The problem with entities like you is that you always leave the details to lesser beings. The secrets of the mountain are mine.’ He depressed a final glyph. A discordant chime sounded, and the console winked off. ‘You shall never be free.’
A lash of starlight whipped across the space between them. Cawl’s conversion field flashed brightly.
We will destroy you a thousand times over.
‘Getting testy won’t solve anything,’ he said. ‘Your technology may look more advanced than mine, but I have the Machine-God on my side.’
A portal opened over the largest translation platform directly into a distant patch of the void. A decompression hurricane sprang up. Immense gravity tugged through the gap. Through the portal a giant, yellow sun b
lazed. Everything in the room was dragged towards it. Necron constructs flew helplessly through. The C’tan was pulled slowly towards the hole.
‘It’s nothing personal!’ Cawl shouted. ‘I quite liked you, really!’
Cawl’s feet clamped to the floor, shattering the rock to hold him in place. Mechadendrites speared into the ground and the machines around him. Anti-grav arrays arranged themselves against the pull of the star. Primus punched a hole into the side of a shrieking quantum engine and clung on grimly.
Fool, said the C’tan. It tore itself away from the portal, hanging unperturbed amid the storm of debris flying out of the mountain. We are the master of the physical realm. Nothing can destroy us. Nothing can restrain us. A little gravity is nothing to us, we who devoured stars. It advanced on Cawl, growing writhing tentacles of light from its disc. Lightning lashed around the hole in space.
‘Well, not nothing,’ said Cawl, upping the volume of the voxmitter built into his face piece to maximum to be heard over the tumult.
Prepare to die! Zarhulash reached for the magos with its tendrils of light.
‘I control the Pharos! The portal there is keyed into my brainwaves. If they cease, it will vanish.’
That is a fine piece of news. It came closer, grew larger. When you are dead, this reach of space will be our plaything.
‘You’re forgetting the small matter of the singularity!’ Cawl shouted. ‘If that portal closes, you will have no escape. The quantum engines are unstable. The entanglement of particles that powered this facility will soon slip its bonds. Not even you can flee a black hole. No power in this universe can!’ Cawl cackled in triumph. ‘So you either fly out of that hole and eat that delicious star I’ve found for you, or you can stay here and die with me.’
Zarhulash stopped. The orb of its being pulsed angrily. Then, with a frustrated roar, it pulled in its limbs.
Know this, slave, roared the C’tan, that you have earned the undying wrath of Zarhulash. We will meet again, and you shall know the true cost of defying a living god.
‘I still won though, didn’t I?’ said Cawl.
The C’tan bellowed, swelled to twice its previous size, then shrank into a small, bright dot that flew up and out of the portal.
‘About time!’ Cawl said. ‘Primus, aid me!’ he wailed, wheeling his arms. The distant sun pulled at him.
Primus grabbed Cawl’s arm.
‘I cannot use my psychic gifts, master. The blackstone still blocks me.’
‘Yes, yes, never mind that!’ said Cawl. With a thought he called the console of light back into being. ‘This and this and this and there!’ he said, his hand moving over the glyphs in a blur.
Over one of the lesser platforms, a slit grew in space, opening up on a starship interior they both knew well.
‘The Zar Quaesitor!’ Primus said.
‘Alas, I cannot shut the larger portal. Too much of the Pharos is damaged. It will fail in moments. We will have to launch ourselves towards our ship.’ He pulsed a command through the rift to his vessel. ‘I’ve amplified the grav-plating in that section of the ship. If we time this right, and leap past the larger portal, we should be able to surf the gravity waves and end up at home safely, so long as Decimus does his duty and destroys the mountain, else it won’t really matter whether we escape or not, because we shall be consumed by a hole in space and time.’
‘If we miss, then we are both dead anyway,’ said Primus.
‘Primus, my first-born son, danger only makes life more exciting!’
They jumped into a maelstrom of light, debris and noise.
Combat lighting flooded the bridge. Tocsins blared from every quarter.
‘My lord!’ the mistress of the augurs shouted. ‘Energetic emissions from the mountain are reaching critical point. Augurs are reading a massive increase in gravity at the xenos site. We must destroy it now! We are already affected. Our orbit is perturbed.’
Felix hesitated. The crust of Sotha was rupturing around the mountain, sucked in, tectonic plates rippling like a disturbed blanket being pulled through a hole. The tactical hololiths showed this greatly magnified. Cracks in the surface glowed red with the planet’s molten blood.
‘My lord, if we do not open fire now, all is lost,’ the mistress of the augurs said.
‘I am ready, tetrarch!’ the gunnery chief reported.
‘Cawl?’ said Felix.
‘No word,’ said the master of the vox.
Felix bit his lip. He had wished Cawl dead many times. To think the monster’s death was here at last, right now. It did not seem real, and he did not want it to happen.
‘Open fire. All weapons.’
It was with visible relief that the gunnery chief passed on Felix’s command. First the ship’s forward lance array scored the void with painful light. Then the ventral and dorsal batteries opened up, hurling solid shot munitions after the lasers. The Zar Quaesitor joined in, and suddenly the void between the ships and the planet was filled with noiseless fury.
The lances hit instantly, cutting the smoking peak of the mountain down and across. The last remains of the Emperor’s Watch slipped down the mountain face. The Zar Quaesitor’s gargantuan plasma arrays burned liquid furrows across the stone. Plumes of evaporated rock burst upwards.
It was not enough.
‘Gravitic anomaly growing in strength! We’re being pulled in.’
‘Full reverse, all thrusters!’ bellowed Mirunus.
The ship rumbled. Its frontal thruster arrays burned hot. Metal groaned as the planet’s soaring gravity pulled back. More alarms rang, warning of failing integrity fields and physical collapse.
Slowly, slowly, the Lord of Vespator turned.
Felix kept his eyes on the mountain. The lances fired again. And again.
‘We’re too late!’ shouted the master of the watch. ‘Maximum burn insufficient to drag us out!’
The ship shook. Felix felt the pull of the Pharos anomaly dragging at him.
Then the shells hit.
The Pharos disappeared in a flash of atomic light. A cloud of vaporised stone rose from the mountain’s location.
The ship was released, and immediately veered hard to port. A period of shouting followed as the crew righted the vessel and brought it back into line with Sotha. Then silence fell. The crew stood, eyes fixed on the world.
‘Report,’ said Felix.
‘Anomaly gone,’ said the mistress of the augurs. ‘The Pharos is destroyed.’ She watched screens bearing data only she could read. ‘The mountain has collapsed into itself.’
The fiery cloud dissipated. A great wen of burning magma marked the site of Sothopolis and Mount Pharos. What had survived for millions of years was destroyed for all time.
‘Vox-master,’ said Felix. ‘Find me Cawl.’
‘My lord.’
The vox hummed with pure function. No interference marred the carrier wave. The Pharos had been silenced. But no matter how many channels the vox-master tried, no return signal came from the archmagos. Reports came in from the planet and the rest of the small fleet. Of Cawl, there was no sign.
For half an hour Felix remained on the command deck, gathering in the expedition, which had been scattered over a large area of the planet.
He was deep in conversation with Cominus when a priority vox chime drew his attention to the comms centre.
‘Message from the Zar Quaesitor,’ said the vox-master. He looked up in surprise. ‘It is the archmagos, my lord.’
‘Respond. Put him on command deck voxmitters.’
The vox crackled. There was a soft chuckle.
‘I’d say that went rather well, wouldn’t you, Decimus?’ said
Belisarius Cawl.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
In Memoriam
Felix occupied the throne in the audience chamber of the Lord of Vespator. His armour was burnished to a high shine. He wore his cloak and chain of office. His weapons and helm were displayed on a stand to his right, the staff of the tetrarchy of Vespator to his left. All around him were expressions of Macraggian art at its finest: friezes in marble surrounds, carved, translucent stone of every hue, statues in metal and marble. A high dome roofed over the hall. The ceiling bore a star map of Greater Ultramar made of jewels; the polished black floor was inset with a gold map in mirror image of the ceiling. A vast rose window looked down on Sotha and Cawl’s Zar Quaesitor floating over the planet, large as a moon. All in the stateroom was perfect, pure, glorious. The order of the star realm of Ultramar was replicated in miniature, an example of what the Imperium could be.
It was a dream. Ultramar was in ruins. The Imperium split asunder. Felix was a hollow ideal in a throneroom of lies. He despised the trappings of power.
‘That is why you must bear this burden, Decimus Felix,’ the primarch had said to him. ‘Because you have no wish for it.’
Felix doubted the primarch knew Cawl had said something similar to him. He wondered if their words were true, or just common platitude. He could never know. He could never really know if he wanted power or not, for he had power, and had had since he was a boy. Ancient genotech made him physically strong and mentally astute. The best weapons the Imperium had were his to use. A swathe of the Imperium was under his governorship. If he had none of those things, would he have yearned for them? Would he fight to attain them? No one could ever know how they would react under different circumstances. He had been torn from his family, but he had wished to join the Ultramarines. That was an attempt to gain power, no matter that he wished to serve. He served now, in this awful era. There was little difference between what he had wanted and what he had got.