by Andy Hoare
‘What do you sense, Seth?’ Brielle answered, casting around her for any sign of danger. Quin hefted his boltgun across his broad chest, and took a step closer to his mistress.
‘I sense… a guttering flame… the flame is the soul, all but extinguished, yet it refuses to die…’
‘I need a little more than that, Seth,’ Brielle responded, biting back a less politic remark. ‘Are we in danger?’
‘Something knows we are–’
Before the astropath could complete his sentence, the vox-channel burst into life. Howling static assaulted Brielle’s ears, before the voice of Joachim Hep cut in. ‘…a way in. Repeat, we have found a way in.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Brielle answered, not entirely sure whether or not Hep had heard her through the raging atmospheric interference. ‘Quin, lead the way.’
‘Recent damage, Joachim?’ Brielle asked of her advisor. Though aged, the man stood almost as tall and broad as a Space Marine. She waited as he studied the vast rent in the cliff-like side of the alien structure, his eyes taking in every detail with practiced skill.
‘I would say so, ma’am,’ Joachim replied, without turning his gaze from the sight before him. ‘Millennia of storm damage brought this about, but the damage itself has only recently occurred.’
Brielle’s gaze moved from her advisor to the great fracture in the alien tomb. Though only a metre or so wide, the crack ran upwards what must have been many hundreds of metres, or would have been, if it weren’t for the damnable geometry of the place. Brielle moved closer, aware of Quin keeping pace behind. She leaned in to examine the ragged edge of the crack, to glean some idea of the material and what might have damaged it.
+Time, my lady,’ Adept Seth spoke into Brielle’s mind. ‘The only force which could damage such a place as this, is time itself.++
Brielle raised an eyebrow and cast a wry glance at her astropath, aware that he had read her surface thoughts. She turned back, leaning in yet closer to the damaged surface. She fancied she could see signs of repair, if only at a minuscule scale. Perhaps this place could heal itself, she mused. Perhaps that explained how it could have withstood the ravages of this storm-wracked world for so many long, lonely aeons.
‘Let’s go,’ Brielle said, stepping into the fracture before Quin could take the lead.
Scant metres into the fracture, Brielle was plunged into utter darkness. She paused, allowing senses other than sight to come to the fore. She extended her awareness as far as she was able, attempting to gain some idea of her surroundings. She strained her hearing. The storm still raged outside, but now its howl was muffled and distant. She heard too the action of the rebreathers worn by her companions, and discerned the sure, heavy tread of Santos Quin as he sought to overtake her, to take the lead lest the party encounter danger and his mistress be threatened.
Savouring the darkness for but a moment longer, Brielle reached her hand to the mechanism at the side of her helmet, lowering a set of goggles over her visor. The headset buzzed as lenses whirred to focus on what Brielle’s own eyes could not register. The goggles were capable of registering many different wavelengths, overlaying what they perceived over Brielle’s own vision.
The blackness was replaced by a kaleidoscopic riot of colours, shot through with grainy static. Brielle adjusted a control at the side of her helmet, and the image resolved into something she could make sense of. Before Brielle, there stretched a circular tunnel into which she and her party had stepped. She looked behind, confirming that the tunnel stretched off in both directions, evidently running perpendicular to the outside wall through which, via the fracture, they had entered.
Satisfied that no immediate danger presented itself, Brielle used the control to cycle through a range of settings, the sight before her changing from one of vivid green hues to another of black with violet highlights, to yet another of purest white with shadows of turquoise. She paused on a vista of deep greens, seeing on the curved wall nearby an intricately carved icon. She stepped closer, aware that Quin did likewise. The icon was revealed to be a series of circles and lines, joined together into what must surely have been some long dead alien script.
‘Joachim.’ She turned to address her advisor, and he stepped forwards, past Santos Quin, who grunted as he stepped aside. ‘Set your readers to sigma-twelve, and look at this.’
Joachim, his goggles already lowered, reached to his helmet and adjusted the controls. A moment later, his head scanned the walls of the corridor.
‘I’ve never seen its like, ma’am,’ Joachim Hep replied after a long pause. ‘Though it puts me in mind of…’
‘Of what?’ Brielle replied, uncertain she wanted to hear her advisor’s answer.
‘Of the machine scripts of the servants of the Omnissiah, ma’am.’
‘But this place is ancient,’ Brielle answered, as much to assuage her own uncertainties as to answer her advisor. ‘It predates the Mechanicus by countless millennia. There can be no connection.’
‘Quite, ma’am,’ Hep replied, nodding gravely to Brielle.
‘Then let’s continue,’ Brielle ordered, ‘this way.’ She made to set off, but this time allowed Santos Quin to take the lead. The feral-worlder raised his boltgun as he advanced into the darkness, using his own set of goggles to pierce the gloom. The warrior used silent hand signals to direct his armsmen to the proper order of march, ensuring Brielle, Hep and Adept Seth were well protected in the centre of the line. Brielle allowed Quin to do so, grudgingly reminding herself that she would, after all, inherit the Warrant of Trade of her rogue trader house, and Quin was only doing the duty her father had bestowed upon the warrior.
Before making off along the tubular corridor, Brielle paused briefly, imagining she heard, at the very edge of perception, an out-of-place sound. She imagined she heard a metallic chitter. She listened intently, but heard no more. With a glance back beyond the rearmost armsmen, she set off.
‘Not a sound,’ Brielle whispered over the vox-net, edging forwards to peer over Quin’s shoulder. She knew she need hardly have given the order, for the armsmen of the party followed the feral-worlder’s lead, and he himself stood motionless and silent against the curved wall at the end of the corridor.
Brielle found herself gazing into a vast blackness. She was about to lower her goggles to scan the space in a different wavelength when she caught a glimpse of a dim, green glow amidst the darkness. Focussing, her eyes adapted, and after a few minutes she could make out a hint of the space before the party. What she saw made Brielle gasp.
The passageway in which her party waited opened out into some manner of chamber so vast that Brielle was struck by a nigh-crushing sense of insignificance as she tried in vain to comprehend its benighted dimensions. Brielle imagined herself an insect crawling across the worn flagstones of the mightiest of cathedrals, the vaults above lost in darkness. A cold shiver ran through her body as she realised the notion was not entirely her own imagining.
So vast was the space that its surface appeared to rise and fall with the curvature of the planet on which it stood. Brielle dismissed the notion; a structure so large would have been detectable from orbit, and the tomb had not measured so vast on their approach. Nonetheless, the geometry of the place played all manner of tricks upon Brielle’s senses. Just as she had been unable to gauge the true size of the structure from outside, she now found herself unable to estimate its internal dimensions, and the sensation was deeply unsettling.
As Brielle’s eyes adjusted further to the gloom, she saw that across the dark floor of the chamber there lay a gently undulating sea of what must surely have been dust. How long had this place stood, she pondered, that its floor should have accumulated such a layer of sediment? Looking closer, she saw low dunes, their crests gently aglow with the ever-present green illumination.
‘Joachim,’ Brielle addressed her advisor, who stood at her back. ‘Do you see a sour
ce for the back light?’
Brielle waited while Hep scanned the vast space before them, then turned her head to look to his face as he answered. ‘I do not, ma’am,’ he replied. ‘It may be the result of some background effect, an energy source not detectable by the augurs.’
‘My lady,’ Quin growled low. Brielle turned her gaze from her advisor to the warrior, instantly alert in response to his tone. ‘Ahead, a hundred paces.’
Brielle squinted as she sought out the point Quin was indicating. After a moment, she found it.
‘Tracks?’ Brielle whispered.
‘Aye, my lady,’ Quin replied. ‘Something small.’
‘Vermin?’ Brielle asked.
‘Possibly,’ Quin growled back. ‘Though I see little for such a creature to hunt.’
Brielle nodded. ‘When?’ she asked.
The feral-worlder glanced back at his mistress. ‘Hours, or decades, my lady. Such is the stillness of this place I can scarcely tell.’
Brielle made to answer, but Adept Seth spoke first. ++An aeon… and a day, mistress,++ he whispered, the sound of his voice whispered directly into her mind. ++An epoch past, yet still to occur.++
Growing uneasy with the astropath’s manner, Brielle replied curtly, ‘Speak plainly, Seth, please.’
The astropath turned his monstrous face towards Brielle. She knew that even though the man lacked conventional sight he was looking straight at her. ‘My apologies, mistress,’ he whispered. ‘I know such things make little sense. But just as your eyes have difficulty perceiving the true dimensions of this place, so too do my own senses. This place is weighted, mistress, weighted with ages impossible for such as us to comprehend. Perhaps the gods themselves—’
‘Enough!’ growled Quin. Brielle’s gaze lingered on the face of Adept Seth for a moment, before she turned back towards the warrior. ‘Such words gain us nothing.’
Brielle took a deep breath, steeling herself to go on, before taking a step forwards into the vast chamber. She glanced back to her party, the dust of impossible ages rising around her boots. Looking back at them, she felt a moment of giddy recklessness, knowing her father would disapprove were he here to witness her actions. An instant later, the feeling passed, to be replaced with the crushing deadness of the tomb. ‘Enough indeed,’ she breathed, and set out across the ocean of dust.
Soon after setting forth across the chamber, the party had come upon the tracks that Quin had spotted from the passageway. The feral-worlder’s hunting senses had told him that some form of insect perhaps a metre in length had made the tracks, and that the fine layer of dust overlaying them told him the trail was not recent. Despite this news, Brielle’s feeling of unease had not been assuaged, but had instead increased the further into the dust sea the party had advanced.
At first, Quin had advised that the explorers should proceed with caution, treading softly lest great plumes of the thick dust carpeting the ground be thrown up with their passing. Brielle was soon forced to countermand this order however, for otherwise they would never have made any progress at all. And besides, she had mused, who might be watching? She had no answer to that question.
As she walked, Brielle attempted once more to gain some idea of the nature of her surroundings. She craned her neck to look upwards, and was immediately greeted with a wave of nausea as the distant planes high above shifted. She looked back to the ground, and a second wave of sickness came over her, causing her to stumble and come to a halt.
‘Ma’am?’ Joachim Hep was at Brielle’s side in an instant, his firm hold grasping the shoulder of her armoured survival suit. A moment later, the rest of the party halted, the armsmen taking guard positions while their taciturn leader worked his way back down the line towards Brielle.
‘I’m fine, Joachim,’ Brielle answered. ‘I’m fine. It’s this place. It plays havoc with the senses.’
‘That it does, ma’am,’ replied Brielle’s advisor, stepping back having satisfied himself that his mistress was able to continue. ‘I cannot read it either.’
At this, Quin interjected. ‘My lady, how much time do you perceive to have passed since we set out across this chamber?’
Brielle looked to the warrior, distracted, beguiled even, for a brief moment by the swirling patterns of his facial tattoos. ‘How much time?’ she repeated, turning her head to look back the way the party had travelled. ‘I would say… Emperor’s mercy…’
‘How long, my lady?’ Quin pressed.
Brielle looked back to the feral-worlder, her throat suddenly dry. ‘Three, three and half…’
‘Minutes?’ Quin asked.
‘Hours,’ Brielle said, the sight of the passageway mouth, a hundred metres behind, still fresh in her mind.
‘…aeons,’ Adept Seth whispered.
‘Behind us,’ Brielle whispered into her vox-link, having subtly disengaged the external amplivox. She made an effort not to change her stance or the pattern of march as the party continued on its way across the dusty chamber.
‘Yes, my lady,’ Quin answered, having followed her lead and adjusted his own communications in the same manner.
‘How long?’ Brielle asked.
‘For me?’ Quin turned his head as he walked, raising an eyebrow sardonically.
‘Fair point,’ Brielle conceded. ‘How long?’ she repeated.
‘No more than thirty minutes,’ Quin said.
‘Can you tell where?’ Brielle asked. Brielle herself had been aware of movement to the party’s rear for several minutes.
‘In this half-light,’ Quin answered, ‘it’s hard to be sure. But, I would say that we are being tracked by one observer, using the folds of the dust as cover, to our rear and left.’
It took a supreme effort of will for Brielle not to turn and look in the direction Quin had described. She could not help but imagine a crosshair aimed at the centre of the back of her head, making her skin suddenly itch beneath her armoured helmet. She felt an irresistible, inexplicable urge to pull the helmet free and shake out her plaited locks, which felt as if they were pasted to her scalp. She shook the notion off, adjusting her step, treading softly through the dust, focussing her every sense behind her for any sign of pursuit.
Brielle imagined she heard a distant voice, so quiet it was little more than a thought. She glanced towards the astropath, and noted that his head was cocked at an odd angle, as if he too were intently listening to something. She focussed upon that distant whisper, half-hearing the forming of alien words, yet not quite able to discern them fully.
+There are more, mistress++ the astropath’s thought-message touched her mind, his withered, scarred mouth not moving at all.
+Where?++ She formed the reply in her mind, unsure whether the astropath would hear her. Evidently, he did hear, for the thought came back immediately, ++Everywhere, mistress. All around us. They slumber… yet they stir.++
With a conscious effort, Brielle closed her mind. She had felt the touch of madness in the astropath’s thoughts, a cold dread verging on the insane. Her eyes met briefly with those of Quin, who nodded to the fore. Whilst Brielle’s attentions had been otherwise engaged, the party had come upon the opposite side of the vast chamber. She looked back, seeing that they had somehow crossed the impossible distance in what felt to her like the course of barely five or six hours.
Brielle stood at the very brink of a wide chasm, cut with unreal precision into the black rock of the alien tomb’s dusty floor. Far below, there emanated a lurid green glow, the same glow, she mused, as had suffused the chamber they had just crossed, yet here it was direct to the point of blinding intensity. Far above, the vaults were lost to blackness, and Brielle saw no other way forwards than to cross the vast chasm.
‘Deploy the line,’ she ordered.
Santos Quin motioned to one of the armsmen, who stepped forwards and unlimbered a heavy grapnel launcher. The man braced his
feet wide, and aimed the launcher at a point on the ground across the chasm, some forty metres distant.
‘Fire!’ Quin ordered.
The launcher’s report was deafening, the explosive crack filling the stillness of the tomb. Brielle experienced an instant of profound dread, as if their intrusion must surely be noted, as if the sound would bring attackers down upon them in an instant. She glanced all around, half-expecting the shadows on the black stone walls to resolve themselves into the dreadful forms of long-dead guardians. She shook off the notion, but guessed that the other members of her party shared it. Even Quin was casting cautious looks all about.
Brielle was brought back to the present by the impact of the grapnel as it struck the ground on the far side of the chasm. She watched as the module at the end of the line activated, power hooks springing forth to bite into the stone, before the energy was shut off an instant later, leaving the blades embedded in the ground. The armsman activated the mechanism on the launcher, and the line tightened. Using a similar system of power hooks mounted at the launcher’s base, the armsman secured the device to the ground on the party’s side of the chasm, and stepped back.
Brielle made for the line, before both Quin and Hep stepped forwards to block her path.
‘With respect, ma’am,’ Hep said, bowing as he did so lest he give undue offence. ‘Please, Brielle,’ he continued, his voice low. ‘I cannot allow you to cross first. Your father would have me flayed by the bilge-rippers.’
Brielle suppressed a smile, despite her mild annoyance, for she was ever ill at ease with others taking risks on her behalf. Yet, she knew her advisor, one of her father’s oldest friends, was correct. She smiled gracefully as she returned his bow and stepped aside.
‘And I,’ interjected Santos Quin, ‘cannot allow you, Joachim, to cross first.’ The warrior held up a hand to wave away any objection Hep might voice. ‘I too have duties to observe.’
Brielle watched, amused, as Joachim Hep considered Quin’s words, before he too stepped aside, allowing the feral-worlder to approach the secured grapnel launcher. With a gesture, the warrior deployed his armsmen so as to cover the far side as he prepared to cross. Unravelling a cord from his belt, Quin attached himself to the grapnel line, and lowered himself over the edge of the chasm.
