Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  The last had been several years before – another garbled vox message from a distant world, relaying the signal from deeper beyond. Throne only knew how it had reached them. The automated response to several centuries of pulsed calls for supplies and extraction was blunt to the point of crudity.

  You are protected even in the darkness. Remember always, the Emperor knows all and sees all. Endure. Prosper.

  The archregent breathed slowly as the memory curdled in his thoughts. Its meaning was clear enough: Remain on your dead world. Live there as your fathers did. Die there as your fathers did. You are forgotten.

  During his rule, he’d personally spoken to only two souls off-world. The first was the magos captain of a deep-space explorator vessel, with no interest in any dialogue beyond cataloguing the world’s usefulness and moving on. Finding little of worth meant the ship had left orbit after a handful of hours. The second soul was a lord among the sacred Adeptus Astartes, who had informed him this region of space came under the protectorate of his warriors, the Genesis Chapter. They sought a fleeing xenos fleet outside the Emperor’s light, and while the Imperial Space Marine lord had professed sympathy with the unwilling colonists of Darcharna, his warship was no place for, in his words, ‘the tread of ten million mortal boots’.

  The archregent had said he understood, of course. One did not argue with warriors of heroic mythology. No, indeed – especially not when they displayed such a thin veneer of patience.

  ‘Do you have no astropaths?’ the Space Marine lord had pressed. ‘No psychic souls with the power to call out into the void?’

  Oh, they did. Incidents of psychic occurrence were perhaps a little too common on Darcharna; a fact the archregent had considered wise to conceal from the Adeptus Astartes lord. Half of the psychically-aware men and women born to the colony cities suffered mutation or deviance beyond tolerable allowance. As for the other half, many were put down in peace when they showed signs of failing their training. What passed for an Astropathic Guild in Sanctuary was a collection of shamans and interpreters of dreams, forever whispering to ancestor-spirits only they could see, and insisting on worshipping the sun as a distant manifestation of the Emperor.

  Those leaders who donned the mantles of Ecclesiarchs – the archregent and abettor among them – sympathised with the solar reverence on this darkest of worlds. Despite most of the cities’ populations having access to the old archives, a huge number of them considered themselves among the faithful.

  Even so, there were limits. At best, the Astropathic Cult was a den of deviancy waiting to happen, with little to no ability to actually communicate off-world. At worst, they were already heretics in dire need of purging, just as they’d been culled by former archregents in previous generations. How many times had they called out into the void never to receive an answer, never to even know if their cries were loud or strong enough to reach other minds?

  The archregent stood at his window for some time, watching the stars decorating the sky. In his reverie, he didn’t even hear the dull grind of the door opening on low power.

  ‘Archregent?’ came a tremulous voice.

  He turned then, to be met by the thoughtful eyes and perpetual frown of Abettor Muvo. The younger man was slender to the point of ill health, and his bloodshot eyes and yellowing skin told of organs working poorly. In this regard, he was no different from any of the population in Sanctuary, or any of the other settlements across Darchana. Crude hydroponic plantations in the sunless bowels of beached void cruisers sustained the surviving descendants of the first colonists, but hardly enriched them. There was – the archregent had decided long ago – surely a difference between living and simply being alive.

  ‘Hello, Muvo,’ the ageing man smiled. It deepened the lines of his thin face. ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of your company?’

  ‘The storm-scryers have sent word from the east hills. I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘I thank you for your diligence. Am I to assume Grey Winter falls once more? It feels early this year.’ But then, it felt earlier every year. One of the curses of getting old, he thought.

  The abettor’s scowl softened for a rare moment. ‘Would you believe, we actually have an uplink?’

  The archregent didn’t bother to conceal his surprise. Vox and pict communication beyond Sanctuary’s walls, and often within it, were so unreliable the technology bordered on being abandoned. He could count on one hand the number of times he’d spoken over a vox in the last two years, and even then, all three of those times had been within Sanctuary’s city limits.

  ‘I would like that very much,’ he said. ‘Visual?’

  The abettor gave an abrupt grunt and said nothing.

  ‘Ah,’ the archregent nodded. ‘I thought not.’

  The two men moved to the archregent’s battered desk, looking into the dead screen set in the wooden face. Several dials needed re-tuning before anything like a voice resolved itself.

  Rivall Meyd, the son of Dannicen Meyd, was a technician in the same vein as his father. He carried the official rank of storm-scryer, which gave him no small pride, but travelling up into the hills and predicting weather patterns was only a small part of his duties. Most of the people walled up back in Sanctuary and the other encampments knew little of his work.

  He was content with their ignorance. Using his heirloom meteorological auspex scanners was more glamorous to layfolk than the truth, which was that he spent most of his time bandaged and goggled against the grit of the dust plains, looking for things that didn’t exist and wasting time on things that couldn’t be repaired.

  They needed metal. The people of Sanctuary needed metal almost as much as they needed food, but there was almost none to be found. Any veins of ore he found in his travels were hollow and worthless. Any scrap metal from damaged ships on the Day of Downfall had been vultured up by his predecessors decades ago.

  The vox towers and storage bunkers were another matter, but enjoyed the same measure of failure. The first generation of colonists, fresh from the Day of Downfall, had clearly been optimistic and enterprising souls. They’d built relay networks of communication towers across the plains, binding each city by the dubious reassurance of vox contact. Bunkers had been established beneath the ground, to refuel and resupply travellers making the overland journey between cities and satellite settlements. Even from their first landing, it was little trouble to brew and refine promethium fuel for wheeled vehicles, though flyers and void-worthy vessels were grounded – thirsty for fuel and unable to sustain flight in the winds anyway.

  Rivall stood at the cliff’s edge, brushing dust from the lenses of his macrobinoculars and looking back at Sanctuary as a stain on the horizon. Most of the city stood empty now. The fleet had come to Darcharna with almost thirty million souls cramped in the confines of pilgrim carriers and repurposed troop ships serving as colonist vessels. Planetwide estimates now numbered them at fewer than a third of that, in the four hundred and seventieth year since the Day of Downfall.

  ‘Meyd, get over here.’

  ‘What is it?’ He lowered the macrobinoculars and moved over the rocks back to his partner. Eruko was wrapped as he was, no skin showing against the abrading wind. His friend was crouched by the backpack vox-caster, working the dials.

  ‘It’s only the bloody archregent,’ Eruko said. ‘If you’re not too busy staring at the horizon.’

  Meyd crouched with him, straining to hear the voice.

  ‘…fine work, storm-scryers,’ it was saying between distortion crackles. ‘…Winter?’

  Meyd was the one to answer. ‘The scanners register a drop in temperature, as well as an increase in winds, over the last week. The first storms are coming, but Grey Winter is still a few weeks away, sire.’

  ‘Repeat please,’ the voice returned.

  Meyd breathed in deep, and lowered the cloth strips wrapped around his face, baring his li
ps to the scratching wind. He repeated himself, word for word.

  ‘Good news, gentlemen,’ replied the archregent.

  ‘So we’re gentlemen now?’ asked Eruko quietly. Meyd smiled back.

  ‘Sire?’ Meyd spoke into the speech-handle. ‘Any word from Takis and Coruda?’

  ‘Who? I am afraid I’m not familiar with their names.’

  ‘The…’ Meyd had to pause to cough glassy grit from his throat. ‘The team responsible for the next eastern boundary. They went to scout last night’s asteroid for iron.’

  ‘Ah. Of course. No word yet,’ the archregent replied. ‘My apologies, gentlemen.’ Rivall Meyd liked the old man’s voice. He sounded kind, always patient, like he genuinely cared.

  ‘I assume this contact is only possible because you managed to repair the erosion damage to East Pylon Twelve.’

  Meyd smiled, despite the grit stinging his lips. ‘It is, sire.’ He didn’t add that they’d needed to junk an old dune-runner buggy to get it done.

  ‘A rare victory. You have my thanks and admiration, both of you. Come to my office when your rotation ends. I will offer you a glass of whatever passes for alcoholic finery in my admittedly limited cellar.’

  Neither Meyd nor Eruko replied.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ the archregent’s voice rang out. ‘Ah, have we lost the link?’

  Eruko hit the ground first, his cheek breaking against the stone. He said nothing. He did nothing, except bleed in silence. The blade through his heart had killed him instantly.

  Meyd wasn’t dead when he fell. He reached a bleeding hand to the vox-caster’s emergency rune button, but lacked the strength to push it. Bloodstained fingertips smeared meaningless patterns over the button’s plastek surface.

  ‘Gentlemen?’ asked the archregent again.

  Meyd drew the last breath of his life, and used it to scream.

  The archregent looked at the abettor. The younger man toyed with the hem of his brown robe’s sleeves.

  ‘I would like you to tell me that was interference,’ the archregent said.

  The abettor sniffed. ‘What else would it have been?’

  ‘It sounded to me like someone was crying out, Muvo.’

  The abettor attempted to force a smile. It wasn’t entirely successful. With respect to the older man, his hearing wasn’t what it once was. They both knew how often Muvo had to repeat himself for the archregent.

  ‘I believe it was interference,’ the abettor said again.

  ‘Maybe so.’ The archregent ran his hands through his thinning white hair, and took a breath. ‘I would still feel more comfortable sending out a search team if those gentlemen have not restored contact within the hour. You heard the wind, Muvo. If they fell from those cliffs…’

  ‘Then they’re already dead, sire.’

  ‘Or in need of help. But dead or alive, we are recovering them.’ He felt curiously energised for a moment. The dust plains had taken too many of them over the years, and Eruko and Meyd were close enough to recover in a few days, if the dust storms were really going to stay away a while longer.

  The vox-channel crackled live again, as though the channels were being tuned. The abettor gave a joyless smirk of triumph. The archregent smiled in response.

  ‘Interference, indeed. You win this round,’ the old man said, but his fingers froze before they touched the dial. The voice rasping from the speakers wasn’t human. It was too low, too guttural, too cold.

  ‘You should never have settled on this world. Our shame is our secret to keep. Tsagualsa will be clawed clean of life once more. Hide in your cities, mortals. Lock your doors, reach for your weapons, and wait until you hear us howl. Tonight, we come for you.’

  V

  A PURE WAR

  Dannicen Meyd had noted his fifty-eighth birthday a month before, and on Darcharna that made him practically ancient. The grit in his bones from a life on the dust plains meant that it ached to move and it ached to lie still, and these days he did a lot more of the latter than the former.

  The plains gave a man a serious beating over the years. There were the skin abrasions to deal with, which came with their own infections soon after. Then you had black lung to worry about from the grit getting into your mouth and nose, eventually losing lung tissue to decay or infection, and spending most of your time coughing up bloody phlegm.

  Sore eyes were a constant misery – always leaking, yet somehow always dry – and his vision was clouded over by years of particulates dulling his sight. He didn’t hear so well, either. The Emperor only knew what decades of ashy grit had done to his ear canals, but when his blood was up and his heart beating fast, everything was muted and faint, like he was hearing things underwater.

  His heart hurt worst of all. Now it rattled and raged at him every time he walked for more than a few minutes.

  All in all, he was a man with every right to his complaints, yet he had very few. Dannicen Meyd wasn’t a man given over to musing over misery. He’d tried to talk Rivall out of the plains life, though. That hadn’t worked out so well. It went almost exactly the same as it’d gone when Dannicen’s own father had tried to say the same words to him, way back in a life before all these aches and pains.

  He was giving in to that often-replayed memory when the city’s sirens started up their discordant wail.

  ‘You’re not serious,’ he said aloud. Storms were starting damn early this year. Last he’d heard from Rivall, they were supposed to have a few weeks yet, maybe even a month.

  Dannicen hauled himself from the couch that served as his bed, sucking air through his teeth as his knees crackled in chorus. Both joints came awake with needling jabs beneath the bone. Nasty, nasty. Getting old is a bitch, make no mistake.

  A shadow passed his window. He looked up just as fists started pounding on the flakboard plank that served as his door.

  ‘Throne of the bloody Emperor,’ he grunted as his knees gave another protest, but he was up and walking no matter what they had to say about it.

  Romu Chayzek was on the other side of the door. Romu Chayzek was also armed. The battered Guard-issue lasrifle hadn’t been new this side of the millennium’s turning, but as Watchman for South-43 Street down to North/South Junction-55, he had the right to bear arms in his patrols.

  ‘Going hunting for dust rabbits?’ he almost laughed, gesturing to the gun. ‘A little early to be shooting looters, kid.’

  ‘The sirens,’ Romu was panting. He’d obviously run here, down the muddy alley that served as a street for the prefabricated bunkerish buildings.

  ‘Storms are early.’ Dannicen leaned out of the door, but any view of the horizon was stolen by Sanctuary’s broken-tooth skyline. Families were pouring from their homes, milling through the street in every direction.

  Romu shook his head. ‘Come on, you deaf old bastard. To the sub-shelters with you.’

  ‘Not a chance.’ The Meyd house had stood up to every Grey Winter so far, as had most of those in this section of the city. South Sector, 20 through 50, had the choicest picks of the troop landers way back at the Day of Downfall. All that armour did the deed when it came to keeping out the worst of the dust storms.

  ‘Listen to me, it ain’t the storms. The archregent’s under attack.’

  For a moment, Dannicen didn’t know whether to laugh or go back to bed. ‘…he’s what?’

  ‘This ain’t a joke. He could be dead already, or… I don’t know what. Come on! Look at the sky, you son of a bitch.’

  Dannicen had seen the panic in Romu’s eyes before, on the faces of those he’d served with outside the walls. That animal fear of being lost on the plains, turned about and directionless as a dust blizzard bore down. Helplessness – sincere, absolute helplessness – painted across a man’s face, turning it sick and ugly.

  He looked to the west, towards the distant archregent’s tower, where a faint o
range gleam illuminated the evening sky behind the rows of awkward urban stalagmites serving as a cityscape horizon.

  ‘Who?’ he asked. ‘Who would attack us? Who even knows we’re here? Who even cares?’

  Romu was already running, blending in with the crowd. Dannicen saw him reach a cloth-wrapped hand to help a young boy back to his feet, and shove him into the press of bodies.

  Dannicen Meyd waited another moment, before he took his aching knees and arthritic hands back inside his house. When he emerged, he carried his own lasrifle – and this one worked just fine, thank you very much. He’d used it in his own days as a volunteer Watchman, shooting looters in the Grey Winters after his retirement from storm-scrying.

  He kept to the edge of the crowd, walking west as they pressed east. If the archregent was under attack, to hell with running and hiding. Let it never be said that Dannicen Meyd didn’t know how to do his bloody duty.

  He looked down, just briefly, to check his lasgun. That was the moment he heard the dragon.

  The crowd, every one of them, screamed and crouched, covering their heads as the beast roared overhead. They looked up with terrified eyes as the roar hurt their ears. Only Dannicen remained exactly as he was, his bloodshot eyes wide in awe.

  The dragon was black against the grey sky, screaming above them on howling… engines. Not a dragon at all. A flyer. A gunship. But nothing had flown on Darcharna for centuries. The crowd was screaming now, thin parents carrying their even thinner children and hiding their eyes.

  It banked above them, streaming fire from its thrusters as the wind rattled grit against its armour-plating. Its own momentum had it drifting as it hovered in the air, fighting the wind raging against the dark hull. Its leering prow seemed to watch the panicking people below before the gunship slowly veered away. Buildings shivered and cracked as its thrusters gave a thunderous boom, kicking the flyer across the sky and into the distance in the time it took Dannicen to blink.