Incarnation - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘A little late,’ he snarled, and he was pulling himself back upright.

  Crew were scrambling back to their positions. Some were still on the deck, where they had slammed down as the warp translation had whiplashed through the Dionysia. ‘Get the medicae crews!’ he roared. Tech-priests and deck officers were shouting, binaric and voidhand’s invective competing with the klaxons.

  Cleander saw Ghast slumped over the watch-station. ‘Medics now!’ he bellowed, jumping across to her as the deck pitched. Her face left a smear of blood on the console as he turned her over. Her mechanical jaw hung open. A bead of blood grew at the corner of her eye. ‘Come on, Arabella,’ he muttered. The bead of blood became a fresh red streak down her cheek. ‘Come on, I will dock your pay for dying, you hear me?’

  A system console set in the pit beneath the command dais blew out in a wash of black smoke and blue flame.

  ‘If I don’t get a medic now–’

  A figure in teal and red robes bent down beside him.

  ‘Animus intacta…’ croaked the medicae as she moved Cleander out of the way. He resisted for a second and then stepped back. The medicae was bald. Bulbous red augmetics whirred and focused in place of eyes. She had the hunched look of someone too tall for comfort, and her skin was so pale she looked closer to a corpse than the bleeding woman she was examining.

  ‘Still alive…’ she said. A pair of snake-tailed servo-skulls buzzed in, needles extending from clusters of metal fingers set beneath their jaws. Drills spun and jabbed towards Ghast’s skull.

  ‘Wait!’ he shouted. A drill punched through Ghast’s temple. Fresh blood showered out. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Preserving her life,’ said the medicae. Her fingers had grown needles from their chrome tips. ‘That is what you wished, I presume?’

  ‘What? Yes, but–’

  ‘Then give me more space, and occupy less of my attention.’

  Cleander stepped back, still staring at the old void mistress as blood ran down her face.

  ‘Sir, we have red condition through lower decks,’ called an officer behind him, quickly followed by another.

  ‘Fire in compartments one hundred and five through one hundred and ninety, deck seventy-five!’

  Another growl of straining metal. Sparks showered through the air. Ghast still wasn’t moving. The medicae’s fingers were a red and chrome blur.

  ‘Reactor output spike!’

  ‘We are losing atmosphere…’

  ‘Hull breach in compartments…’

  He blinked. He needed to get hold of what was happening to his ship. He needed to get up and trust that the medicae would take care of Ghast. He needed to start being the captain. He was suddenly aware again of the clamour echoing through the bridge. His head was still spinning.

  ‘Get me status, position and external sensor data.’

  ‘Sir,’ answered an officer.

  ‘And get me vox links to Lady Viola, and the Navigator enclave.’

  ‘Sir,’ came the replies. He tried to straighten himself, but his muscles were shaking. He felt cold. A bright, bitter taste clung to his tongue.

  He had been through bad warp to reality translations before, but nothing like this. They had been running ahead of the storm fronts spreading from Vengeance, one of the three so-called Storms of Judgement. The ship’s two Navigators had been screaming for most of that passage. One of them had lapsed into coma. But they had reached the translation point and dived back into being with margin to spare. Except they hadn’t. Just as the Dionysia had breached the skin of reality the storms had surged. Vast currents of psychic energy had reached through the ether like hands snatching at a toy. Caught between worlds, the Dionysia had been pulled in different directions of reality. It had lasted less than a heartbeat, but it was enough to almost break its hull in two. Phantoms had rolled through the ship as ectoplasmic echoes had chased it into the void. Now it was half blind, burning from within and with half its crew insensible or insane…

  Bad. Very bad in fact, but as he kept staring at Ghast’s bloody face, Cleander knew that it was not the storm surge that was making him shake. It was what had happened just before it.

  ‘Sir, we have vox-link to Lady Viola,’ called an officer.

  He looked at his hand. It was trembling on the rail of the command dais.

  ‘Sir…’

  He had felt the surge a moment before it had happened. Not thought it might happen, not spotted something that others had missed, but actually felt reality draw tight and snap back like a rope pulling taut and then breaking. That was why he had shouted to brace. That was why he had known it was going to happen. Because it already had.

  ‘Brother,’ came Viola’s voice, scratching and popping as it came from the vox-speaker, still controlled and clipped as ever, but edged with what sounded like anger as much as shock. ‘We need external auspex data. We need it now.’

  ‘What in the name of all that is sacred just happened?’ he said softly, raising his hand from the rail.

  ‘What?’ said Viola’s voice. ‘What did you say? The link is going. What in the name of all that is sacred just happened?’

  Cleander looked up from his hand to where the spindle-figured medicae was rising from beside Arabella Ghast.

  Arcs of electric charge raced over consoles as systems flared back to life. A whole new set of alarms began to sound.

  ‘Proximity alert!’

  ‘We have multiple vessels and objects in close proximity.’

  ‘Shields coming online!’

  ‘Show…’ began Cleander, but there was something wrong with the next word. ‘Show me,’ he managed, but something was wrong with his legs, and the view was swimming in front of his eyes.

  Everything was becoming quiet.

  Soft.

  Slow.

  ‘Cle…an…d…er…!’ Viola’s voice was a stretched purr over the vox.

  ‘I might…’ He felt himself speak the words as much as heard them. ‘I might need your help,’ he said, and slid down to the deck with the sound of his sister’s voice and the blare of klaxons following him down into darkness.

  The Dionysia tumbled as it came from the warp, spinning end over end, smeared with evaporating ghost light as it met the cold void. Thrusters fired on its hull. Its tumble twisted, but it spun on, fighting the drag of forces that clung to its hull as the warp storm screamed from the wound it had left in reality. Curtains of light stained the stars, hiding the pure black of the night behind bruise-like auroras.

  The dead ships were waiting for it, spread out in the dark. Sections of vast hulls slid through the void, the force of their deaths still turning them over like pebbles in a child’s hands. None of them had survived intact. Here, a kilometre-long piece of hull lay close to a bridge castle torn out by its roots; there, a prow turned slowly over, smaller flakes of debris forming a cloud that glittered in its wake. On and on the debris field went out.

  The Dionysia met its first piece of wreckage before it could stop spinning. It was one of the smaller chunks, the size of a small hab-block, and serrated like a broken dagger. Its void shields ignited just before impact. Light flashed in the dark. The piece of debris came apart, burning fragments spilling over the ship’s prow as it plunged on.

  Viola saw it all unfold in her augmetic eye as she ran onto the bridge. Bal was behind her. Both of them were still wearing their gear from their excursion to the bilge decks.

  ‘Helm control!’ she shouted, as she leapt onto the command platform.

  A deck officer turned from shouting orders.

  ‘Aye, mistress.’

  She stopped when she saw Cleander. Her brother was sprawled in the command throne that he never used. Blood streaked the left of his face, and a wound was clotting on his scalp. Medicae Primus Iaso was bent over him.

  ‘The Duke von Castellan is alive,’ said Iaso, without looking up.

  Viola looked around at the chaos of the bridge. Her augmetic eye was flooding with damage and sensor
data.

  ‘Where is Ghast?’ she shouted.

  ‘Incapacitated,’ answered Iaso.

  On the screen above, a blurred projection of near-space debris.

  Viola took two precisely timed breaths and let the world grow still. Shouts and flashes and sound became another strand of data. The information flashing through the screens and chattering from parchment printouts were flows. All of it became like the wind blowing in a forest. It was a technique that one of her savant-tutors had called the Gaze of Heaven, because in reducing the world to that level of data abstraction felt like looking at the world as a god must – everything just an expression of a larger whole, the worst unfolding disaster just a twitch in a flow of variables that had never begun and would never end. It had always seemed to her like a mildly heretical analogy, but having mastered its trick she had to admit that it was utterly accurate.

  She saw the tumbling trajectory of the Dionysia, the crew and the warp storm energies billowing through the void around them, and the tick-tick-tick of time as a weave of values and translations. She saw it, and realised that they had very little time amongst the living.

  ‘I have helm command,’ she shouted, and was already calling orders as the confirming replies came from the bridge crew. ‘Fire port thrusters, course correct a hundred and eighty-seven by a hundred and sixty-seven by eighty-four. Full engine burn on my mark.’

  The Dionysia shook and the view on the external pict-feed screens pitched over. Chunks of ragged metal the size of mountains spun past. The remaining void shields sputtered and flared as micro-debris hit them at the speed of cannon shells.

  ‘Mistress, the shields–’

  ‘Damn the shields! They won’t take another major impact. We need to dance out of this graveyard.’

  ‘Mistress Viola von Castellan,’ blurted one of the tech-priests, ‘the sacred cogitators are still processing the optimal pathway out of the debris field.’

  ‘That is not time we have.’

  ‘Engines blessed and consecrated for one hundred per cent burn,’ called an enginseer from down in the machine pits beneath the dais.

  Viola watched time tick past at the edge of her augmetic eye. Her lips were moving, whispering threads of logic and possibility, and pain was already building in her temples. The problem with the Gaze of Heaven was that human minds were not supposed to function like that. Perhaps the lexmechanics of the Adeptus Mechanicus with their machine-looped brains could cope with it, but with a brain of meat, you couldn’t look down from the place of the gods for long.

  The view of the pict-screens was still rolling over and over as the Dionysia kept tumbling, its thrusters fighting against its momentum. The severed prow of a macro-hauler spun into view, massive, looming like a mountain thrown into the night.

  She could feel the bridge crew tense. Breath caught in throats. The time values and vector calculations balanced in her mind.

  ‘Fire main engines!’ she shouted. ‘Full burn.’

  Force slammed through the ship. It shot forward, its path corkscrewing. The prow of the macro-hauler spun to meet it. The scream of proximity alerts rose. Then they were running past it close enough that a child could have thrown a stone between the two of them. The Dionysia kept on, its trajectory stabilising, passing through shard clouds, like an arrow shot through the whirl of battle, never wavering even as the bones of dead ships tumbled close enough to knock them from the sky.

  Viola swayed, and closed her eyes. A metallic taste filled her mouth, and her skull felt like it was going to explode.

  ‘Once we are true and clear set course for Dominicus Prime,’ she said. ‘Get us in-system fast.’

  She turned as Medicae Iaso straightened from beside the unconscious Cleander.

  She was shaking, she realised.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Viola asked.

  ‘The head wound was not severe. His collapse was caused by other factors that I am not yet certain of.’

  ‘Other factors?’

  ‘Mistress von Castellan, you above all know that diagnosis, like deduction, is best handled without it becoming guesswork.’

  Viola felt her mouth open to snap a reply and then closed it. Flecks of light were glittering at the edge of her sight.

  ‘But in your case I barely need to guess,’ said Iaso, her carbuncle eyes focusing on Viola. ‘Pupils widely and irregularly dilated, vibration in extremities – you are suffering from extreme mental fatigue and a cluster of side effects from cognitive and neural enhancers.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Josef called, as he moved onto the bridge and hurried towards the command dais. ‘Blessed saints…’ he breathed as he saw the holo-displays and screens.

  ‘The storm is closing,’ a strong voice came from behind all of them. Covenant walked into the pulsing alert light. He wore armour over his storm coat, and his psycannon sat on his shoulder, its targeting lens locked on the void displays. The officers and crew turned to bow. A twitch of his hand dismissed the formality as he came to stand amongst those clustered on the dais. ‘These are ships that tried to enter the warp, to flee the system.’

  The image of the spinning wrecks danced silently across the displays, yet Viola could not help but think of screams when she looked at them.

  ‘Chewed and spat out…’ said Josef. ‘Emperor guard the souls of those on board.’

  ‘The storm is contracting around this location – intensifying, focusing,’ said Covenant, his eyes moving from the images of dead ships to where a projection of the Dominicus System spun in a smaller cone of holo-light. ‘Events are moving quickly.’

  ‘We will not be able to get out of the system if the storms do not abate,’ said Viola.

  Two servitors were lifting Cleander and Arabella Ghast onto steel stretchers. She glanced at her brother. A trickle of blood was running from the corner of his mouth. For a second the thoughts running through her head stopped. Then she looked up and saw the green lens of Covenant’s psycannon twitch up from its focus on Cleander’s face.

  ‘Take us into the system, full speed,’ said Covenant, and turned and took a step towards the bridge doors. The servitors were lifting Cleander and Ghast’s stretchers, Medicae Iaso walking at their side. Covenant raised his hand to halt them as they passed.

  Viola had been about to start issuing fresh orders, but found that she was watching as the inquisitor put a hand on Cleander’s forehead, and closed his eyes. Viola thought that for a second he looked tired, tired and older than he was. His lips moved silently for a second. Then he took his hand away. ‘Take us in. Full speed,’ he said, and began to walk away. ‘The storm is coming fast.’

  ‘God-Emperor, in Your wisdom, hear the words of Your daughter.’

  Severita spoke the words, following the thread of their sound through the tunnels of exhaustion. Grey blurred the edge of her sight, but she kept her eyes steady on the figure clamped within the cryo-casket. The plasteel box was tilted upwards. A metal door sealed its front. Pipes led from the casket’s sides to clattering machines bolted to the floor. Frost covered the casket, stealing its hard edges with growing crystals.

  ‘Grant my soul strength to undo my sins. Grant me agony that I might reach salvation. Grant me…’

  The air was thick, clotted with the heat that thumped from the cryo-machines. Sweat prickled her scalp and ran down her face. The hilt of her sword was against her forehead. Her pistols holstered at her side. The black and red of her armoured bodyglove gleamed under her hessian tabard. Her vigil had lasted for a hundred and eight recitations of the Litanies of Penance and the Pleas for Absolution. She kept her gaze directly ahead, staring at nothing but seeing everything. And the words of prayer rolled on, marking the march of unchanging seconds from present to past, while the Dionysia passed through the night on the way to the future.

  She would need to sleep eventually. Even faith had its limits. She would attend to that later, once the ship had completed the passage through the Dominicus System to its target. She just needed to
stay focused. She just needed to…

  She stood. The sound of prayer stilled on her lips. Part of her mind screamed at her for breaking the ritual as she stepped forward so that she could see through the view slot in the front of the casket. A silent scream of rage roared at her in the voices of every sister she had known. She raised her hand, wondering what she was doing, and wiped the frost from the glass. Enna Gyrid’s face looked back at her with open, unseeing eyes.

  ‘I have killed many of your kind,’ she said, paused, swallowed and continued. ‘I struck my first blow against a witch on a planet called Rhea. My sword went through it. I don’t know if it was a man or a woman, it was just fire…’ She paused, hot air filling her lungs at the memory of ash rising in a cyclone through the charred building. ‘My sword went right through it, from tip to guard. I could not wrench it free, and the witch pulled away and took my sword with it. I looked for it later in the remains. The blade had melted, even the fire gem in the pommel. Until then I had thought that blessed steel in the hands of the pure could not be stained or broken by the powers of sorcery. That was what we were taught, you see. That was what I believed.’ She took a breath and felt the salt of her sweat sting her eyes.

  ‘But the sword was destroyed.’ She bit her lip. Beyond the frosted window the frozen traitor – who had not known what she was – lay unmoving. ‘It’s a question, you see. If I was pure then, was the fire which destroyed the sword also pure? Or was the fire impure and so was I? Or is there such a thing as purity at all?’ Severita winced at the last words. Why was she weak? Why did she give her sin greater strength? Why could she not shed the skin of doubt?

  ‘That is the problem,’ she said, feeling her jaw clench shut after the words. ‘I don’t know the answer. I don’t know if you are unclean, Enna Gyrid, or blessed, or just unlucky. And that is a problem. It’s a problem because the strength of faith is certainty, and I just can’t hold on to that.’