Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘Like his father,’ Octavia pointed out.

  ‘Exactly. And look what happened to the primarch. His tale ended in death through sacrifice.’

  Octavia rose to her feet, casting the blanket aside. She was still not showing, though Septimus had too little experience to know if her belly should be beginning to round yet or not. She seemed unconcerned, either way. He felt a brief, guilty flush of thanks that she was strong enough for the both of them, sometimes.

  ‘You think he is leading us towards some kind of last stand?’ Octavia asked. ‘That seems unlikely.’

  ‘Not intentionally. But he has no desire to lead these warriors, and nor does he wish to return to the Eye of Terror.’

  ‘You’re just guessing.’

  ‘Perhaps I am. It doesn’t matter, either way. Tell me you want our child born on this ship, into this life. Tell me you want him taken by the Legion and shaped into one of them, or to grow in the darkness of these decks, starved of sunlight his whole life. No. Octavia, we have to get off the Echo of Damnation.’

  ‘I am a Navigator,’ she replied, though there was no longer any amusement in her eyes. ‘I was born to sail the stars. Sunlight is overrated.’

  ‘Why is this a joke to you?’

  The wrong words. He knew it as soon as he’d spoken them. Her gaze flashed as her smile became glass.

  ‘It is not a joke to me. I merely resent your patronising assumption.’ In all her time there, she’d never sounded quite so like the aristocrat she’d once been. ‘I am not so weak that I need saving, Septimus.’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’ But that was the problem. He wasn’t sure what he meant. He’d not even meant to speak the thought aloud.

  ‘If I wished to leave the ship,’ she said, lowering her voice, ‘how could we do it?’

  ‘There are ways,’ said Septimus. ‘We’d think of something.’

  ‘That’s very vague.’ She watched him as he moved around her chamber, absently tidying away old food ration containers and data-slates her attendants had brought her as entertainment. Octavia witnessed the bizarre domestic ritual with her arms crossed beneath her breasts.

  ‘You are still filthy,’ he said, distracted.

  ‘So you say. What are you thinking?’

  Septimus stopped for a moment. ‘What if Talos knows more than he’s telling his brothers? What if he’s seen how this all ends, and works now to his own plan? Perhaps he knows we’ll all die here.’

  ‘Even one of the Legion wouldn’t be that treacherous.’

  He shook his head, watching her with those mismatched eyes. ‘Sometimes, I swear you forget just where you are.’

  She wasn’t blind to the change within him tonight. Gone was his cautious, endearing tenderness, as if fearful she would either break at a touch or kill him with an accidental glance. Gone was his vulnerability. In place of his patient virtues, frustration left him raw and curiously bare before her.

  ‘Has he spoken to you recently?’ Septimus asked her. ‘Is there anything different in his words?’

  She moved over to her bank of monitors, reaching for several tools in a nearby crate. ‘He’s always spoken like someone expecting to die sooner rather than later,’ she ventured. ‘Everything from his mouth is like some painful confession. I’ve always seen it in him – he never became what he wanted to be, and instead hates what he’s become. The others… deal with it better. First Claw and the others – they enjoy this life. But he has nothing but hatred, and even that is growing hollow.’

  Septimus sat next to her throne, closing his human eye in thought. His augmetic eye sealed closed in response, like a picter lens whirling shut. Screams filled the silence: distant but resonant, anonymous but so very human. He was no stranger to the sounds on an Eighth Legion vessel, but too much had changed now. He couldn’t tune it all out the way he’d done for years before. Now, no matter what he did, no matter where he worked, he could still hear the pain in those crying voices.

  ‘Those poor bastards being skinned alive – do they deserve it?’

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ she replied. ‘Why would you even ask such a stupid question?’

  ‘Because it was the kind of question I’d stopped asking years ago.’ He turned to look at Octavia, holding her gaze for several long moments. ‘This is your fault,’ he told her. ‘Maruc understood, but I tried to ignore him. You did this to me. You came here, and made me human again. The guilt, the fear, the desire to live and feel and…’ He trailed off. ‘You brought it all back. I should hate you for this.’

  ‘You are welcome to do so,’ she said as she worked on rewiring one of her external viewfinder monitors. Octavia was hardly in love with the work, but the little tasks of maintenance helped pass the time. ‘But you’ll be hating me because I returned something valuable to you.’

  Septimus gave a noncommittal grunt.

  ‘Do not huff and sigh at Terran aristocracy,’ she said. ‘That’s childish.’

  ‘Then stop… I don’t know the words in Gothic. Yrosia se naur tay helshival,’ he said in Nostraman. ‘Smiling to mock me.’

  ‘You mean “teasing”. And I’m not teasing you. Just say what you want to say.’

  ‘We need to get off this ship,’ he said again, watching her as she worked, sat there with a wire-stripping tool between her teeth.

  Octavia spat it out, using it with one dirty hand. ‘Maybe we do. That doesn’t mean we’ll be able to do it. The ship can’t go anywhere without me. We’ll hardly get very far before they realise we’re gone.’

  ‘I’ll think of something.’ Septimus moved over to her, embracing her from behind. ‘I love you,’ he said, speaking into her hair.

  ‘Vel jaesha lai,’ she replied.

  An hour later, she was making her way through the Echo’s tunnels at the head of her attendants, loosely clustered behind her in a ragged pack. The screams were omnipresent now, echoing through the air and travelling through the walls with the same insistence as a natural wind.

  The excruciation chambers were several decks down, and hardly a short walk. In terms of territory on board the warship, she knew they were deeper in more dangerous sectors, where the crew weren’t as valuable, and life was accordingly cheaper.

  ‘We come with mistress,’ one of her attendants had said.

  ‘We’ll all come,’ Vularai amended, resting her hand on the prized Legion sword she wore at her hip.

  ‘Whatever you wish,’ Octavia had said, though she was secretly glad of their devotion.

  A pack of equally ragged deck-dwellers fled before her group – the third to run rather than remain. Several had watched her pass, hissing in Gothic, Nostraman, and languages she couldn’t even guess let alone comprehend. One pack had challenged her advance, demanding their tradable possessions.

  ‘My name is Octavia,’ she’d told the grimy leader with the laspistol.

  ‘That means exactly nothing to me, girl.’

  ‘It means I’m the ship’s Navigator.’ She’d forced a smile.

  ‘That means as much to me as your name does.’

  Octavia had taken a breath, glancing at Vularai. Most of humanity, in all its huddled, unenlightened masses, might be essentially blind to the existence of Navigators, but she had no desire to explain her heritage – or worse, demonstrate it – here.

  That’s when he made his mistake. The pistol held loosely in his hand was a concern, but hardly a threat. When he waved it in her direction, however, her attendants stiffened. Their whispers overlapped into a serpentine layer of ‘Mistress, mistress, mistress…’

  The gang leader didn’t conceal his unease as well as he’d hoped. He was outnumbered, and as he learned from the solid-slug shotguns being pulled from filthy robes, he was outgunned as well. The iron bars and chains carried by most of his kindred suddenly seemed less impressive.

  ‘You’re no
t deck vermin,’ he said. ‘I see that now, all right? I didn’t know.’

  ‘Now you do,’ Vularai rested the oversized gladius on her shoulder, where its edge caught what little light existed.

  ‘Just leave,’ Octavia told him. Her hand strayed to her stomach without conscious thought. ‘There’s already enough death on this ship.’

  Although her attendants moved on in peace, their blood was up now. They didn’t bother hiding their weapons as they walked on, deeper into the ship.

  No one challenged them again.

  She found Talos in one of the excruciation chambers, just as she’d expected.

  Before entering, she’d placed her hand on the sealed door, ready to go in.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she chided Vularai. ‘Navigators keep a hundred secrets, Vularai. Whatever waits behind these doors is nothing compared to the secrets kept in the sublevels of the Navis Nobilite’s spires.’

  ‘As you say, mistress.’

  The door opened on grinding hydraulics. She saw Talos for less than a second, and then she saw nothing at all. The smell that struck her was strong enough to have an obscene physicality – it quite literally hammered against her the moment the bulkhead rolled open. Her eyes squeezed closed, stinging like salt in an open wound. The reek seeped into the soft tissue of her eyes, choked her throat, cramped her lungs, and lashed at her skin with a disgusting, damp warmth. Even her sworn curse was a mistake, for the moment the air hit her tongue, the stench became a taste as well.

  Octavia collapsed to her hands and knees, throwing up onto the deck. She had to get out of the room, but her eyes wouldn’t open, and she couldn’t catch her breath between her spasming lungs and rebelling stomach.

  Talos watched this spectacle from his place by the surgery table. His attention remained rapt as she vomited a second time.

  ‘I am given to understand,’ he said, ‘that it is common for females in your… condition… to regurgitate as part of the natural process.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she breathed, before her guts clenched again, forcing her to heave out another tide of thin, sour gruel.

  ‘I have almost no experience with such things,’ he admitted. ‘We studied little of the human condition in regards to gestation of children.’

  ‘It’s not that,’ she wheezed. Inhuman fool, he had no idea. Several of her attendants were similarly struck down, gagging and choking on what they could see and smell.

  She crawled from the chamber, half-dragged by Vularai and one other. Only when they had her outside did she manage to rise to her feet, catching her breath as her eyes watered.

  ‘Seal the door…’ she panted.

  ‘Mistress?’ one of her attendants asked, confused. ‘I thought you wished to come here?’

  ‘Close the door!’ she hissed, feeling her stomach heave again. Three of the other attendants still hadn’t recovered either, but they’d made it out of the room.

  Vularai was the one to obey. The bulkhead leading into the excruciation chamber rumbled closed. Despite the mask of bandages, she was gagging and choking herself, barely able to speak.

  ‘Those people on the tables,’ she said. ‘How are they still alive?’

  Octavia spat the last of the bile from her lips, and reached back to re-tie her ponytail.

  ‘Someone get me a rebreather. I’m going back in.’

  ‘We have to talk,’ she said to him.

  The body on the surgery table moaned, too breathless and ruined to scream anymore. So little of it remained that Octavia could no longer determine its gender.

  Talos looked over at her. The blades in his hands were wet and red. Four bodies, skinned and dripping, hung from dirty chains around the central table. He saw her eyes flicker to the hanging bodies, and explained their presence in a voice of inhuman calm.

  ‘They are still alive. Their pain bleeds into this one’s mind.’ The Night Lord stroked the bloody knife along the prisoner’s flayed face. ‘It ripens now, swollen with agony. They no longer beg for death with their throats, tongues and lungs… but I can hear their whispers stroking inside my skull. Not long now. We are so very close to the end. What did you want to speak of, Navigator?’

  Octavia took a breath through the rebreather mask over her mouth and nose. ‘I want the truth from you.’

  Talos watched her again, while the bodies drip, drip, dripped.

  ‘I have never lied to you, Octavia.’

  ‘I’ll never understand how you can make a credible attempt at sounding virtuous while standing in an abattoir, Talos.’ She wiped her eyes; the sick heat bleeding from the ruptured bodies was making them water.

  ‘I am what I am,’ he replied. ‘You are distracting me, so I would ask you to make this quick.’

  ‘And the manners of a nobleman,’ she said softly, trying not to look at the butchery hanging on display. Blood trickled into a gutter grille beneath the table. She didn’t want to guess where it led. She suspected something, somewhere down there on a lower deck, was feeding.

  ‘Octavia…’ he warned.

  ‘I need to know something,’ she said. ‘I need to know the truth about all of this.’

  ‘I have told you the truth, including what I expect from you.’

  ‘No. You got it into your head that we had to come here. Now there’s this… carnage. You know more than you’re telling us. You know if the Imperium comes to answer these atrocities, it will come in force.’

  He nodded. ‘That seems likely.’

  ‘And we may not escape.’

  ‘That also seems likely.’

  Octavia’s rebreather clicked at the zenith of each slow breath. ‘You are doing what he did, aren’t you? Your primarch died to prove a point.’

  ‘I do not plan to die here, Terran.’

  ‘No? You don’t plan to die here? Your plans aren’t worth a damn, Talos. They never are.’

  ‘The raid on Ganges Station seemed to go well enough,’ he pointed out. ‘And we sent the Salamanders running at Vykon Point.’

  His amusement only fuelled her temper. ‘You’re supposed to be our leader. You command thousands of souls, not just your handful of warriors.’

  He growled a laugh. ‘Throne in flames, do you truly think I care about every single creature that draws breath on this ship? Are you mad, girl? I am a legionary of the Eighth. Nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘You could have killed Septimus.’

  ‘And I will, if he defies me again. The moment his usefulness is outweighed by his defiance, he dies skinless and eyeless on this very table.’

  ‘You’re lying. You’re evil, heart and soul, but you’re not the monster you pretend to be.’

  ‘And you are trying my patience, Terran. Get out of my presence before I lose the last vestiges of my tolerance for your irritating ethical theatrics.’

  But she was going nowhere. Octavia took another calming breath, trying to control her stubborn anger.

  ‘Talos, you are going to kill all of us unless you’re careful. What if the Imperium’s answer isn’t some ship of salvation to carry the survivors away to tell some awful story, but a vast Navy battlefleet? It’ll likely be both. We’re as good as dead if they find us nearby.’ She gestured to the quivering wretch on the table. ‘You want to poison the warp with their pain and annihilate any hope of safe flight through the Sea of Souls, but it will be as much of a struggle for me. I cannot guide us through broken tides.’

  Talos said nothing for several seconds. ‘I know,’ he finally replied.

  ‘And yet you’re going through with this?’

  ‘This is one of the precious few times since the Great Betrayal that my brothers and I have felt like the sons of our father again. No longer raiding, no longer merely surviving – we are once more doing what we were born to do. It is worth the risk.’

  ‘Half of them a
re just killing for the sake of it.’

  ‘True. That, also, is the Eighth Legion way. Nostramo was not a wholesome birthworld.’

  ‘You’re not listening to me.’

  ‘I listen, but you speak in ignorance. You do not understand us, Octavia. We are not what you think we are, because you have always misunderstood us. You judge us by human morality, as if we have ever been chained to those ideals. Life means something different to the Eighth Legion.’

  She closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘I hate this ship. I hate this life. I hate you.’

  ‘Those are the most intelligent words you have ever said to me.’

  ‘We’re going to die here,’ she said at last. Her hands bunched into helpless fists.

  ‘Everyone dies, Octavia. Death is nothing compared to vindication.’

  XVII

  GAMBITS

  Cyrion was alone, now that his latest victim lay dead.

  He sat with his back to the wall, breathing through spit-wet teeth. The gladius in his hand clattered to the stained decking. Shivers still rippled through him; pleasant aftershocks as the man’s death played out again in his mind. Real fear. Real terror. Not the dull haze of pain that was all that remained among the astropaths and their other victims. This had been a vital, strong man with no desire to die. Cyrion had cherished the look in his eyes as the gladius hacked and carved. He’d been scared to the bitter end: a dirty, unwarranted death, replete with begging, deep in the ship’s lower decks.

  The Night Lord had needed it – water to a parched man after all the clinical infliction of pain on their captives. The crew member’s final moments, as his weak fingers scratched uselessly at Cyrion’s faceplate, were the final, perfect touch. Such delicious futility. He tasted that desperate fear, its actual tactile sweetness, like nectar on the tongue.

  A groan escaped his lips through the tingling rush of chemicals flooding his brain and blood. It was good to be a god’s son, even one with a curse. Even when the gods themselves watched a little too closely.

  Someone, somewhere, was saying his name. Cyrion ignored it. He had no mind to return to the higher decks and go back to the surgical carving that needed to be done. That could wait. The flood was beginning to fade now, and with it, the tremor in his fingers.