Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  A strange name, that. The flood. He couldn’t recall when he’d first come to know his gift by that name, but it fit well enough. Latent psychic strength wasn’t miraculously rare in the Eighth Legion – or any of the Legions beyond – but his remained a source of quiet pride. Cyrion had never been born psychic, or else his touch of the sixth sense was weak enough to go unnoticed by the extensive tests upon Legion indoctrination. It had simply happened over time, during the years they’d spent in the Eye of Terror. His awareness had blossomed, like a flower opening in the light of the sun.

  The wordless whispers began at the edge of his hearing, night after night. Soon enough he could make sense from the hissed phrases, stealing a word here or a sentence there. Each of them shared a single strain of familiarity: they were all fearful utterances, unspoken but still audible, pulsing from those he killed.

  In the beginning, he’d merely found it amusing. To hear the fearful final words of those he butchered.

  ‘I do not see why you find this so funny,’ Talos had rebuked him. ‘The Eye is influencing you.’

  ‘There are those who bear worse curses than I,’ Cyrion pointed out. Talos had let it rest, never mentioning it again. Xarl hadn’t acted with the same restraint. The stronger the gift became, the less inclined Cyrion was to hide it, and the filthier Xarl found his presence. Corruption, Xarl had called it. He’d never trusted psykers, no matter the benevolence of the powers they claimed.

  ‘Cyrion.’

  His name brought him back to the present, back to the stink of oily metal walls and newly dead bodies.

  ‘What is it?’ he voxed back.

  ‘It’s Malcharion,’ came the response. ‘He… he has awakened.’

  ‘Is this a hilarious jest?’ Cyrion hauled himself to his feet with a grunt. ‘Deltrian swore there was no progress.’

  ‘Just get up here. Talos warned you about hunting in the ship’s bowels when we have work to do.’

  ‘You’re as bad as he is, sometimes. Has the war-sage spoken?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Mercutian broke off the contact.

  Cyrion started walking, leaving the bodies behind. No one would miss the lower-deck trash that lay in bloody pieces behind him. Hunting in the Echo’s deep levels was a forgivable sin, unlike Uzas’s occasional mad slayings through Blackmarket and the officer decks, butchering the most valuable members of the crew.

  ‘Hello,’ said a soft, quiet voice from nearby. Too low to be human, but unrecognisable in the vox distortion.

  He looked up. There, in the chamber’s iron rafters, one of the Bleeding Eyes crouched with a gargoyle’s patience. Cyrion felt his skin crawl; a rare sensation indeed.

  ‘Lucoryphus.’

  ‘Cyrion,’ came the reply. ‘I have been thinking.’

  ‘And evidently following me.’

  The Raptor nodded his sloping helm. ‘Aye. That also. Tell me, little Lord of Smiles, why do you come down here so often to sniff out the excretion-reek of fear?’

  ‘These are our hunting grounds,’ Cyrion replied. ‘Talos spends long enough down here, himself.’

  ‘Maybe so.’ The Raptor’s head jerked once, either a flaw in his armour’s systems or the result of warp-flawed genetics. ‘But he kills for release, for pleasure, for the surge of adrenaline stinging in his veins. He was born a killer, therefore he kills. You hunt to sate another appetite. An appetite that has bloomed within you, not one you were born with. I find that interesting. Oh, yes.’

  ‘You may think whatever you choose.’

  The angled, almond-shaped eye lenses showed Cyrion’s reflection in miniature. ‘We have watched you, Cyrion. The Bleeding Eyes see everything. We know your secrets. Yes we do.’

  ‘I have no secrets to keep, brother.’

  ‘No?’ Lucoryphus’s laugh was somewhere between a chuckle and a caw. ‘A lie doesn’t become truth simply because you give it voice.’

  Cyrion said nothing. He briefly considered reaching for his bolter. His fingers must’ve twitched, for Lucoryphus laughed again.

  ‘Try it, Cyrion. Just try.’

  ‘Make your point,’ the warrior said.

  Lucoryphus leered. ‘Why must there be a point to a conversation between kindred? Do you assume every soul is as treacherous as you are? The Bleeding Eyes follow Talos because of that oldest axiom: he breeds trouble wherever he walks. The primarch paid attention to him, and that is an interest still fascinating all these centuries later. He has a destiny, one way or another. I wish to witness that destiny. You, however, have the potential to become a nuisance. How long have you fed on human fear?’

  Cyrion breathed slowly before answering, suppressing the tempting flood of chemical stimulants from intravenous feeds in his wrists and spine.

  ‘A long time. Decades. I have never kept track.’

  ‘A very weak breed of psychic vampirism.’ The Raptor exhaled a thin breath of steam from his vocabulator grille. ‘I am not one to question the gifts of the warp.’

  ‘Then why question me at all?’

  He realised his mistake as soon as the question left his lips. Delaying had cost him the edge of opportunity. From the corridor he’d come down, another of the Bleeding Eyes crawled on all fours, blocking the doorway.

  ‘Cyrion,’ it said, seeming to struggle with speech. ‘Yes-yes.’

  ‘Vorasha,’ he replied. It was no surprise when another three Raptors crawled out of the tunnel ahead, their sloping daemon-masks watching him with unblinking scrutiny.

  ‘We question you,’ Lucoryphus rasped, ‘because while I would never speak out against the warp’s changes, I have much less patience for treachery so close to the prophet. Stability is vital now. He is planning something secret, something he has chosen not to share. We all sense it, like… like a static charge in the air. We walk now in the pressure of a storm yet-to-be.’

  ‘We trust him,’ said one of the other Raptors.

  ‘We do not trust you,’ finished a third.

  Lucoryphus’s voice was ripened by a smile. ‘Stability, Cyrion. Remember that word. Now run along and witness the war-sage’s flawed resurrection. And remember this talk. The Bleeding Eyes see all.’

  The Raptors scattered back into the tunnels, worming their way deeper into the ship.

  ‘That isn’t good,’ Cyrion said to himself in the silent darkness.

  He was the last to arrive, entering the Hall of Reflection almost thirty minutes after the initial summons. The chamber’s usual industry was halted in surreal immobility. None of the servitors went about their business, while dozens of low-tier Mechanicum adepts looked on in relative silence. If they communicated with each other, it was via means that the legionaries couldn’t discern.

  Cyrion walked to First Claw, who stood by the circular bulkhead entrance to one of the antechambers. The barrier itself was rolled open, revealing the stasis chamber within. Cyrion felt something at the edge of his hearing, like the threat of thunder on the horizon. He cycled through his helm’s audio receptor modes, picking up the same almost-audible infrasound murmur no matter the frequency.

  ‘Do you hear that?’ he asked Talos.

  The prophet stood with Mercutian and Uzas, saying nothing. Variel and Deltrian conferred in hushed voices by the adept’s central control tables.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Cyrion asked.

  Talos turned his skulled faceplate to him. ‘We are still not certain.’

  ‘But Malcharion is awake?’

  Talos led him into the stasis chamber. Their boots sent resonant echoes clanging off the iron walls. Malcharion’s sarcophagus remained on its marble plinth, chained in place, supported by hundreds of copper filament wires, power cables and life support tubes. The sarcophagus displayed Malcharion’s triumphant death in exquisite detail: gold, adamantine and bronze worked into a vision of a Night Lord victorious, head tilted back to roar at a st
arry sky. In one hand, the tail-crested helm of a White Scar khan; in the other, the helmet of an Imperial Fist champion. Last of all, his boot rested on the proud helm of a Blood Angels lord-captain, grinding it into the Terran dirt.

  ‘The stasis field is down,’ Cyrion pointed out.

  ‘It is,’ Talos nodded, crossing to one of the secondary consoles ringing the central plinth. His fingers tapped against several plastek keys. As soon as the final key clicked, the chamber burst with a flood of agonised screaming. The cries were organic, human, but with a tinny edge and an undertone of buzzing crackle.

  Cyrion winced, it was that loud. His helm took a couple of seconds to filter the sound to tolerable levels. He didn’t need to ask the screams’ origin.

  ‘What have we done to him?’ he asked. The screaming died as Talos killed the power feed from the sarcophagus to the external speakers.

  ‘That is what Variel and Deltrian are working on. It seems likely that Malcharion’s wounds at Crythe have left his mind shattered beyond recovery. There is no telling what he would do if we connected him to a Dreadnought chassis. For all we know, he would turn on all of us.’

  Cyrion thought over his next words with exceptional care. ‘Brother…’

  Talos turned to him. ‘Speak.’

  ‘I have supported you, haven’t I? You wear the mantle of our commander, but it doesn’t quite fit.’

  The prophet nodded. ‘I have no desire to lead anything. I’m hardly keeping it a secret. Can you not see me doing all I can to restore our true captain?’

  ‘I know, brother. You are the living embodiment of someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. But you are coping. The raid on Tsagualsa was a fine touch, as was sending the Salamanders running at Vykon Point. I don’t care what you’re planning; the others are either content to trust your judgement, or lose themselves in indulgence in the meantime. But this…’

  ‘I know,’ Talos said. ‘Trust me, I know.’

  ‘He’s a Legion hero. You will live and die by how you treat him, Talos.’

  ‘I am not blind to that.’ The prophet ran his hand across the graven image on the surface of the sarcophagus. ‘I told them to let him die after Crythe. He’d earned the respite of oblivion. But Malek – a curse upon him, wherever he is – countermanded my order. And when Deltrian smuggled the coffin aboard, it changed everything. He hadn’t died, after all. Perhaps I was wrong to believe him too melancholy to survive in this shell, since he’d fought for life when he could so easily have died. We could have used his guidance, Cyrion. He should have stood with us again.’

  Cyrion gripped his brother’s shoulder guard. ‘Tread with care, Talos. We stand on the edge of everything coming unravelled.’ He looked at the sarcophagus himself for several long moments. ‘What did the Flayer and the tech-adept suggest?’

  ‘Both of them believe he is ruined beyond recovery. They also both concur that he could still be formidable – if unreliable – in battle. Variel suggested controlling Malcharion with pain injectors and focused excruciators.’ Talos shook his head. ‘Like an animal, collared by unkind masters and trained by beatings.’

  Cyrion expected no less from either of those two. ‘And what will you do?’

  Talos hesitated. ‘What would you do, in my place?’

  ‘Truly? I’d flush the organic remains into the void without any of the Legion knowing, and install one of the grievously wounded warriors in his place. Spread the word that Malcharion died during the rituals of resurrection. Then there would be no one to blame.’

  The prophet turned to face him. ‘How noble of you.’

  ‘Look at the armour we wear. Witness the cloak of flayed flesh worn by Uzas; the skulls hanging from our belts; the skinned faces draped over Variel’s pauldrons. There is nothing of nobility in us. Necessity is all we know.’

  Talos watched him for what seemed an age. ‘Is there a reason for this sudden proselytising?’

  Cyrion thought of Lucoryphus, and the Bleeding Eyes’ words. ‘Just my caring nature,’ he smiled. ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I have ordered Variel and Deltrian to see if they can calm him down with synapse suppressors and chemicals. There may be a way to reach him yet.’

  ‘And if that fails?’

  ‘I will deal with that possibility when it becomes an unarguable truth. For now, it is time we played our hand. Octavia’s time has come.’

  ‘The Navigator? Is she ready for this?’ Whatever ‘this’ is, he added silently.

  ‘Her readiness is immaterial,’ said Talos, ‘for she has no choice.’

  The Echo of Damnation rode the tides, powered by plasma fusion, driven by the sentient heart at the ship’s core, and guided by the third eye of a woman born of humanity’s ancestral home world.

  Talos stood by her throne, his own eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the screaming sea. Souls crashed against the hull, mixed in with the very life-flesh of daemons, shaking the warship and rippling over them in an endless, howling tide. He listened, for the first time in decades he truly listened, and heard once more the music of his father’s throne room.

  A breathy sigh hissed from his parted lips. Gone was the doubt. Gone were the concerns of how best to lead the few warriors that remained to him, and how he should spend the lives of his slaves. Why hadn’t he done this before? Why had he never noticed the similarity in sound until Octavia pointed it out? He knew all the tales that warned of listening too close to the warp’s song, but they all went blissfully ignored.

  The Navigator was sweating, staring into a thousand shades of black. One moment the darkness screamed at her, expressing its pain through souls bursting against the hull. The next, it called to her; nameless things beckoning with the same claws that raked along the ship’s metal skin.

  The tides writhed with the same coiling chaos found within a nest of serpents. Flashes of sick light winked between the overlapping warp-stuff, either the distant Astronomican or the deceptions of daemons – it didn’t matter to Octavia. She aimed the ship for every pulse of light that flickered ahead, crashing through the void-tides with the power and weight behind one of the species’ oldest warships. The cold waves of unreality burst apart at their prow, and trembled in their wake, forming shapes no human eyes could ever perceive.

  The Echo itself remained in the back of her consciousness. Unlike the sullen, contrary soul of the Covenant, the Echo of Damnation had a great, eager heart. Terra had no sharks, but she knew of them from the Throneworld’s archives. Predators within the ancient seas, forever needing to move forward lest they die. That was the Echo in a single, simple concept. It desired nothing more than to run with all its strength, breaking through the barriers of the warp and leaving the material realm behind.

  You have listened too long and too hard to the warp’s call, she chided the ship as sweat ran down her temples.

  Burn, burn, burn, it pulsed back. More strength to engines. More fire in core.

  She felt the ship racing harder in response. Her own instinctive impulses flashed through the neural-sensitive cables plugged into her temples and wrists, curbing the sudden leap in thrust. The Echo’s primal excitement snapped back, entering her body through the same ports, sending her into a delicious shiver.

  Calm, she pulsed. Calm.

  The ship’s reply was another effort to increase thrust. Octavia could almost see the slave crews in the cavernous chambers of the engine decks, sweating and shouting and dying to feed the generators at the pace demanded of them. For a moment, she thought she could feel them all the way the Echo felt them: as a hive of flea-like, insignificant sentience, itching within her bones.

  The Navigator pulled back from the mesh of sensation, rejecting the ship’s primitive emotions and settling firmer within herself. The cold kiss of her chamber’s air supply touched her sweating skin, causing another involuntary shudder. She felt as though she’d been holdin
g her breath under boiling water.

  ‘Starboard,’ she whispered into the vox-orb drifting before her face. Its tiny suspensors kept it afloat – a half-skull rendered into a portable vocabulator – and transmitted her words to the crew and servitors on the command deck above. ‘Starboard, three degrees, pressurised thrust to compensate for warp density. Axial stabilisers are…’

  On and on she mumbled, staring into the darkness, sharing control of the warship with the vessel’s crew and its own angry heart.

  Outside, the pantheon of ethereal inhumanity raged against the ship’s Geller field. The tide itself recoiled, burned and bleeding, each time it broke against the diving vessel. Octavia scarcely spared a thought for the deep, cold intelligences hiding in the endless void. It took all her concentration to focus on the narrow path she was ramming through the Sea of Souls. She could endure the screaming, for she was born to see through the unseeable – the warp held few secrets or surprises for her. But the Echo’s eager joy threatened her focus like nothing else ever had; even the Covenant’s mulish resistance had been easier to overcome. That required force. This required temperance. It required a lie told to herself: that she didn’t share the same savage joy, that she didn’t feel the same need to burn the engines unto self-destruction, running faster and diving deeper than any soul – artificial or otherwise – had ever done before.

  The Echo’s dark delight filtered back through the neural feeds, spicing her blood with excitement’s charge. Octavia pulled back from the bond, forcing her breathing to slow as her body reacted to the symbiotic pleasure in the most primal of ways.

  Slower, she breathed, sending the word back to the ship’s core even as she spoke it aloud. Geller stability is wavering.

  You are wavering, the Echo’s dull sentience pulsed back. A slave to reason.

  The ship gave another shiver in sympathy to her own. This one was tighter, born of tensed muscles and clenched teeth. It spoke of control and focus, as Octavia’s will blanketed the ship’s machine-spirit.