She felt a presence next to her, and looked up at the blunt, razored edge of Tariquel’s presence.
‘We should go,’ he said. ‘This ship will be atoms in moments.’
‘I know,’ she replied, but did not move.
‘Why do you wait? The war leader of the Space Marines is slain and those few that skulk in its dark corners will soon be dead too.’
‘Because I need to be certain,’ said Bielanna, shutting out the blood-hungry anger of Tariquel’s war-mask. She placed her hand on the splintered chest of the Space Marine, the touch of his bloodstained armour distasteful to her, for it too carried a terrible legacy of slaughter and murder. She closed her eyes, letting the skein rise up around her in all its myriad complexity.
Its impossible weave enfolded her, but within the Halo Scar, where time and destiny were abstract notions that could be distorted, the monstrous deformation of this ancient relic of a billion year old war made a mockery of such concepts as certainty. The threads of the mortals that had died here were fragile things at best, hard to trace back even into the recent past, which was itself bent out of all recognisable shape.
She found the thread of the Space Marine, a frayed and bloody strand that unravelled all the way back to Dantium where she had first discerned the closest origin of those who were denying her the future she so craved. This warrior was their leader, the one who bound them to his purpose, and his death must surely unmake that purpose...
Yet as she cast his thread back into the skein, she saw with aching horror that the image of the laughing eldar children had grown even more distant and unattainable.
Far from restoring that potential future, this death had shunted it further into the realm of possible futures that were ever more unlikely to come to pass.
‘No!’ she sobbed, falling across the chest of the Space Marine as though mourning his passing.
Tariquel took hold of her arm and hauled her to her feet with enough force to leave a mark even through her armour.
‘It is time for us to go, farseer,’ he snarled.
His warrior’s touch brought her back to herself and in a moment of sickening clarity she saw he was right. The threads of the skein surged with power, and she saw the potential danger to the Starblade in a sudden and painful vision of explosions and splintering wraithbone.
With tears streaming down her angular cheeks, Bielanna followed the Striking Scorpions back through the webway portal.
An age or an instant passed, a span of deep time like an epoch of the galaxy or the fleeting life of a decaying atomic particle. Kotov felt a lurch of sickening vertigo, even through his machine body, as his consciousness returned to the forefront of his brain with a jolt of cerebral impact. His senses were pitifully small, stunted things that were barely adequate for basic existence, let alone conversant with the mysteries of...
Kotov struggled to remember where he had been and what he had seen, knowing on some desperately fundamental level that it was vital he not forget the things he had learned.
‘Archmagos?’ said a voice he knew he ought to recognise, but which was completely unknown to him. Nothing of his surroundings was familiar to him, but as the cloaked and hooded individual next to him laid a clawed, mechanical hand on his shoulder, that changed in an instant.
‘Archmagos?’ said Tarkis Blaylock, his augmitters conveying strain, concern and a measure of anticipation.
‘Yes,’ he managed eventually. ‘I am here.’
‘Ave Deus Mechanicus,’ said Blaylock. ‘I thought you had been subsumed by the machine-spirit and were lost forever in the datasphere.’
‘No such luck, Tarkis,’ spat Kotov, then regretted it immediately.
Though he could remember almost nothing of what he had experienced in the unknown depths of the Speranza’s machine heart, he knew that without Blaylock’s lifeline to the organic world above, he would never have returned to the seat of his consciousness.
‘Apologies, Magos Blaylock,’ he said. ‘I am thankful for your aid in bringing me back.’
Blaylock nodded. ‘Were you successful?’
‘Successful?’ said Kotov. ‘I... I don’t know.’
‘Yes, he was,’ said Galatea, clattering over to stand before him on its awkwardly-constructed legs. ‘Can you not feel the great heart of the vessel responding?’
Kotov stared at the hybrid machine intelligence, and what had seemed only moments before to be a creature of immense sophistication and threat now seemed small and primitive, like a wheel-lock pistol next to a macro-cannon.
The command deck was still lit with numerous threat responders, damage indicators and cascading lists of chrono-gravometric alarms, but overlaying that was a subtle rain of information-rich light that permeated the existing data streams and soothed them with tailored algorithms of perfect code.
Systems Kotov had never known existed were activating all over the ship and those that had previously been rendered blind and useless by the fury of the Halo Scar returned to life as though they had never been afflicted. Looping targeting arrays for weapons he had never imagined the Speranza possessing and others that he did not understand flashed up before the astrogation and engineering hubs.
Azuramagelli and Saiixek backed away from their stations, confused and not a little frightened by this unknown power rising up around them. Stark against the red of the main display, the image of an alien starship resolved itself. It was smooth and graceful, its hull like a tapered gemstone and topped with a vast sail that billowed in the gravitational tempests. Its image flickered and danced as though attempting to conceal itself like a teasing courtesan, but whatever matrices were at work in the heart of the Speranza saw through its glamours with ease.
‘Return to your stations,’ ordered Blaylock, cycling through the information pouring into the command deck.
Saiixek nodded and Azuramagelli’s armature scuttled back to the astrogation hub, inloading the flood of resurgent information as a representation of the Explorator Fleet bled into the noosphere. It was a distorted representation, but at least it gave Kotov a snapshot of what assets he had left to him. He saw that many of his support ships were missing, and could only assume the rogue currents and riptides had dragged them off course and seen them pulled apart in the gravitational storms.
‘Report,’ said Kotov as informational icons flashed to life around the deck.
‘Wrathchild and Moonchild closing and assuming attack postures,’ said Azuramagelli.
‘Mortis Voss reports it has a firing solution for its torpedoes,’ added Saiixek.
Unable to keep the relish from his augmented voice, Kryptaestrex said, ‘Multiple firing solutions have presented themselves to me, archmagos. I am unable to ascertain their source or the nature of the weapon systems, but they all have a lock on the alien vessel.’
Kotov opened a stable vox-channel to every ship of war in his fleet.
‘All vessels open fire,’ he said. ‘I want that ship destroyed.’
The flanks of the Speranza shuddered as a weapon system built into its superstructure ground upwards on heavy duty rails. A vast gun tube rose from the angled planes of the Ark Mechanicus like the great menhir of some tribal place of worship being lifted into place. Power readouts, the likes of which had rarely been seen in the Imperium since before the wars of Unity, bloomed within the weapon and a pair of circling tori described twisting arcs around the tapered end of the unveiled barrel.
Elements of the technology that had gone into their construction would have been familiar to some of the more esoteric branches of black hole research and relativistic temporal arcana, but their assembled complexity would have baffled even the Fabricator General on Mars. Pulsing streams of purple-hued anti-matter and graviton pumps combined in unknowable ways in the heart of a reactor that drew its power from the dark matter that lurked in the spaces between the stars. It was a gun designed to crack open the stately leviathans of ancient void war, a starship killer that delivered the ultimate coup de grace.
But even that wasn’t fast enough to catch a ship as nimble as one built by the bonesingers of Biel-Tan and guided by the prescient sight of a farseer. The pulse of dark energy coalesced a hundred kilometres off the vessel’s stern and a miniature black hole exploded into life, dragging in everything within its reach with howling force. Stellar matter, light and gravity were crushed as they were drawn in and destroyed, and even the Starblade’s speed and manoeuvrability weren’t enough to save it completely as the secondary effect of the weapon’s deadly energies brushed over its solar sail. Chrono-weaponry shifted its target a nanosecond into the past, by which time the subatomic reactions within every molecule had shifted microscopically and forced identical neutrons into the same quantum space.
Such a state of being was untenable on a fundamental level, and the resultant release of energy was catastrophic for the vast majority of objects hit by such a weapon. Though on the periphery of the streaming waves of chronometric energy, the Starblade’s solar mast detonated as though its internal structure had been threaded with explosive charges. The sail tore free of the ship, ghost images of its previous existence flickering as the psycho-conductive wraithbone screamed in its death throes. Blue flame geysered from the topside of the eldar vessel and the craft lurched away from the force of the blast.
Its previously distorted and fragmentary outline became solid, and the circling captains of the Kotov Fleet wasted no time in loosing salvo after salvo of torpedoes at the newly revealed warship.
Mortis Voss let fly first, with a thirty-strong battery of warheads aimed in a spreading net that would make escape virtually impossible. Wrathchild and Moonchild followed, firing bracketing spreads of torpedoes before both vessels heeled over to present their flank batteries of lances. Stabbing beams of high energy blazed at the Starblade and had this engagement been fought in open space, the eldar vessel would have been reduced to a rapidly expanding bloom of shattered wraithbone, combusting oxygen and white-hot debris.
The gravitational vagaries of the Halo Scar made for an unforgiving battleground and only a handful of torpedoes punched through its starboard hull to tear out great chunks of its guts in raging firestorms of detonation.
Even with the clarity provided by the roused machine heart of the Speranza it was impossible to tell what, if anything, had survived the storm of lances, torpedoes and the crushing power of the temporary black hole. It was collapsing in on itself in a cannibalistic storm of self-immolation, and by the time its raging furies had faded into the background radiation of the Scar, there was nothing to indicate the presence of the Starblade.
Every shipmaster knew the eldar ship had likely survived the punishing assault, but their decks echoed with the cheers of jubilant ratings, many of whom had not expected to live through the battle. The electromagnetic hash of the void engagement would remain lousy with spikes of dirty radiation for years to come, painting a vivid picture of the battle for anyone that cared to look.
The chrono-weapon lowered from its firing position with majestic grace until it was once again flush and secure within the body of the Speranza, invisible and indistinguishable from the surrounding superstructure, no doubt as its builders had intended.
The Starblade was still out there somewhere, but for now its threat had been neutralised, its boarders repelled and its captain given a valuable lesson in humility.
And with its retreat, the Kotov Fleet pressed on.
In the end it took another six days of sailing and the loss of seven other vessels before the forward element of Archmagos Kotov’s Explorator Fleet finally breached the gravitational boundaries of the Halo Scar. One refinery vessel was lost when its astrogation consoles developed a fractional degree of separation from its designated datum point and it ended up drifting from the safe corridor assigned to it.
A binary neutron star cluster caught the ship in its divergent gravity waves and broke it in two. Its death was mercifully swift after that, both halves crushed and dragged in to add their steel and flesh and bone to the spiteful mass of the dead stars. Two emptied fuel carriers suffered engine failure and were pulled out of their trajectories before the frantic Mechanicus enginseers could relight their plasma cores.
Of the other four, a forge-ship, a solar collector and two fabricatus silo-ships, nothing was known. Their shipmasters simply ceased their positional reports and no attempt to raise them or pinpoint their co-ordinates could locate them. The Halo Scar had swallowed them as surely as though they had been blown apart by the eldar warship.
Mortis Voss was the first ship to register the normalising gravity fields and return its forward auspex and surveyor gear back to nominal levels. There was no clearly defined moment of emergence, simply a gradual lessening of aberrant gravity and light distortion as the worst of the corpse-stars were left behind and the last scion of the Voss Prime forge world sailed through the scattered clouds of stellar gas and dust that blurred the edge of the Scar.
Its mater-captain halted the vessel as soon as she was able, and began a detailed surveyor scan of the wilderness space that surrounded it. What it revealed was somewhat less than the spectacularly different vista that had perhaps been expected, but no less terrible for its very familiarity.
Over the next day, more and more ships limped from the depths of the Halo Scar; battered, twisted and damaged, but triumphant at having navigated a region of space that had claimed so many other souls.
The Speranza emerged two days after Mortis Voss, and gratefully inloaded the spatial data accumulated by the lesser ship’s mater-captain. Deep in the astrogation chamber, the Magos Tychons filled their days building a picture of the discovered space that lay before them; its unknown suns, its vast gulfs and the blinding swathe of ruddy light from the ageing red giant at the heart of the dying star system that lay before the Speranza.
The doomed system had been almost completely overrun by the runaway nuclear reactions at the heart of the star. If any inner planets had once existed they were long dead, swallowed by the star’s expanding corona, and the last remaining world of the system was a solitary pale orb that hung like a glittering diamond at the farthest extent of the star’s gravitational reach.
Under normal circumstances, any star in its death throes would be avoided as a matter of course, the space within the system too volatile and too thick with ejected matter and radiation to be worth the risk of venturing too close.
Yet it was towards this last surviving world that Roboute Surcouf led the Kotov Fleet.
Roboute watched the seething haze of the bloated red giant with a measure of awed respect and sadness. This star had birthed itself ten billion years ago, but it had now exhausted its sustaining fuel and its span of life was at an end. In its impossibly vast existence it had known many guises, shone in varied spectra and provided light and warmth to the vanished planets that had once orbited its life-giving rays.
It might once have been worshipped, it might have had many names in its long life, but now it was simply a dying relic from a time when the galaxy was still young and stumbling though its earliest stages of stellar evolution. Archmagos Kotov had named it Arcturus Ultra, a name that struck Roboute as appropriate in several ways.
He sat in the raised plug-chair next to Kotov’s throne, connected to the Speranza’s noospheric network via the spinal plugs, and followed the course trajectories plotted by Magos Azuramagelli. They intercepted the orbit of the last planet of the Arcturus Ultra system, a world that had thus far survived the star’s expanding death throes by virtue of having its orbit thrown out by the stellar reactions that would soon destroy it. Roboute had been granted the honour of giving this world an identifier, and had chosen to name it after something beautiful that was lost to him.
He called it Katen Venia, and it was this world that the memory wafer he had at last handed to Archmagos Koto
v had identified as their destination. With their emergence from the Halo Scar, Roboute had honoured his agreement with the archmagos and made his way directly to the command deck of the Speranza.
He had solemnly offered the memory wafer to Kotov, who took a moment to savour the sensation of handling its gold-embossed surfaces with his machined hands before slotting it home in the shell-like casing of the locator beacon he kept mounted on the back of his command throne. The inloaded astrogation data immediately synchronised with the local stellar configuration and the location of the craft from which it had been ejected was swiftly picked up on the last remaining world of the Arcturus Ultra system.
Advance servitor-probes fired into the outer reaches of the system had provided a more detailed rendering of Katen Venia, its surface a crystalline wasteland of silica peaks and exotic particle radiations. A faint, but unmistakably Imperial signal was being broadcast from the jagged haunches of a cut-crystal range of mountains, from what was assumed to be the wreck of the Tomioka, Magos Telok’s lost flagship.
Magos Azuramagelli and Magos Blaylock had wasted no time in plotting the optimal course towards the source of the signal, and despite the losses suffered crossing the Halo Scar, the mood of the assembled magi grew optimistic. The planet was still ten days distant, but seemed so close that they could just reach out and pluck its diamond brilliance from the heavens like a jewel of radiant light.
‘Fitting that we should find new beginnings in a place of endings,’ said Kotov, calling the swirling ball of light towards him.
In honour of their arrival on the far side of the Halo Scar and venturing into the unknown space beyond the known reaches of the Imperium, Archmagos Kotov had chosen to attach his cranium to a more regal body than his warrior aspect. This automaton body was robed and gilded in precious metals, shimmering gemstones and binaric prayer strips. A heavy cloak of silver mail fell in cascading waves of hexamathic geometries, and while he carried no obvious armaments, there was no doubting that the trio of flexing servo-arms, with their collection of clamps, drills and pincers, could be wielded as weapons.
Priests of Mars Page 36
