Void Stalker

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I am your Navigator, she whisper-hissed the silent words. And I guide you.

  The Echo of Damnation never communicated with actual language; its pulses of emotion and urges formed words only as Octavia’s human mind fought to find meaning in them. Its surrender now never even manifested as false utterances, though. She merely felt it cower back from her surge of willpower, taking its inflicted emotions with it.

  Better, she smiled through the tears of sweat. Better.

  Close now, Navigator, it sent back.

  I know.

  ‘Beacons,’ she mumbled aloud. ‘Beacons in the night. The blade of light. The Emperor’s Will given shape. A trillion screaming souls. Every man and woman and child ever given to the Golden Throne’s soul engines, since the dawn of the One Empire. I see them. I hear them. I see the sound. I hear the light.’

  Whispering voices slithered into her ears. Deck by deck, the word was being passed, so pathetically slow in its reliance on mortal speech. Octavia had no need to stare at hololithic star maps. She cared nothing for the rattle and clang of deep-void auspex readers.

  ‘All stop,’ she whispered through lips bright with spit. ‘All stop.’

  The hand on her shoulder could have come a minute, an hour, or a year later. She wasn’t sure.

  ‘Octavia,’ said the low, low voice.

  She closed her secret eye, and opened her human ones. Vitreous humour gummed them, leaving them sore as she forced them open. She felt the soft caress of her bandana being draped over her forehead.

  ‘Water,’ she demanded, her voice a horse rasp. Her attendants muttered nearby, but the hands bringing the dirty canteen to her lips were armoured in midnight blue. Even the tiniest knuckle-joints gave soft growls.

  She swallowed, caught her breath, and swallowed more. With trembling hands, she wiped the cooling sweat from her face, then pulled the intravenous feeds from her arms. The cables in her temples and throat could remain there, for now.

  ‘How long?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Sixteen nights,’ said Talos. ‘We are where we need to be.’

  Octavia closed her eyes as she sank back into the throne. She was asleep before Vularai covered her shivering form with a blanket.

  ‘She must eat,’ the attendant pointed out. ‘Over two weeks… The baby…’

  ‘Do whatever you wish,’ Talos said to the bandaged mortal. ‘That is none of my concern. Wake her in six hours and bring her to the excruciation chambers. All will be ready by then.’

  She wore her rebreather again, listening to the sound of her own respiration turned low and throaty. The mask over her nose and mouth stole all sense of taste and scent, leaving only the stale musk of her own breath, tinged with a chlorine edge that stung the back of her tongue.

  Talos stood behind her, ostensibly to oversee the moment. She wondered if he’d really remained in order to prevent her from running.

  Six hours’ sleep wasn’t enough, not even nearly enough. Octavia felt her weariness as a physical sickness, leaving her weak and slow, as if her blood beat around her body at a muted rate.

  ‘Do it,’ Talos ordered her.

  She didn’t – at least, not immediately. She walked among the chained bodies, between the slabs on which they lay, weaving through the medicae servitors mono-tasked with keeping the carcasses alive just a little while longer.

  The husks laid out on each table scarcely resembled humans in any real sense. One was a mess of musculature and stripped veins, twitching its final moments away on the surgery table. The flayed ones were little better; neither were those now deprived of their tongues, lips, hands and noses. Ruination was complete on each and every one of them – desecration had never seen such variety. She was walking through a living monument to fear and pain: this was the Legion’s imagination given form.

  Octavia looked back at Talos, glad he still wore his helm. If she’d seen any pride in his naked eyes in that moment, she would have never been able to tolerate his presence again.

  ‘The Screaming Gallery,’ she said, above the muffled moans and beep of pulse trackers. ‘Was it like this?’

  The Night Lord nodded. ‘Very much so. Now do it,’ he said again.

  Octavia took a stale breath, moved to the closest table, and removed her bandana.

  ‘I will end it for you,’ she whispered to the organic wreckage that had once been a man.

  It turned its eyes towards her with the last of its strength, lifted its wet gaze to the Navigator’s third eye, and looked into absolute oblivion.

  XVIII

  A SONG IN THE NIGHT

  The world Artarion III.

  In the Tower of the Emperor Eternal, Godwyne Trismejion watched the astropath writhing against the restraining straps. This was nothing unusual. It was his job to watch over his wards when they dreamed, monitoring them as they sent their somnolent messages to receptive minds on other worlds. He found it amusing – in his own dullish, slow-witted sort of way – that in an empire of a million worlds, the most reliable way to carry a message to another world was to take it there yourself.

  Even so, his wards had their roles to play. Astropathic contact saw a great deal of use on Artarion III, as might be expected of any world so heavily populated by guild trade interests.

  The astropath started to bleed from the nose. This, too, was within tolerable parameters. Godwyne clicked a steel switch and spoke into his console’s vox-input.

  ‘Vital signs for Unon fluctuating within… tolerable…’ he trailed off, his eyes locked to the spiking polylithic printout. The readings spiked harsher with each passing second.

  ‘Sudden heart failure, and…’ Godwyne looked back to the astropath, seeing the onset of real convulsions now. ‘Heart failure and… Throne of the God-Emperor.’

  Something wet and red burst against the viewscreen window. He couldn’t see through the mess to be sure, but when a purification team entered six minutes later, they would learn it was Astropath Unon’s heart and brain, burst by unprecedented external psychic pressure.

  By that time, Godwyne was on the edge of panic as he worked at his console, his hands full of vague printed images from the minds of his astropathic wards, and his head full of the wailing sirens as more and more of them died.

  ‘What are they hearing?’ he screamed at the chaotic spill of frantic information. ‘What are they seeing?’

  The Tower of the Emperor Eternal, as a precious and expensive psychic node – warded and strengthened against daemonic intrusion – absorbed all the death and pain taking place within its walls. It didn’t distil it or filter it; it merely fused the sudden fears and mortal agonies with the hideous incoming transmission, and beamed the foul whole back into the void.

  The notes of the song sailed on through the night, now with a new chorus.

  Each world hearing the song would add another chorus in turn.

  The world Vol-Heyn.

  On the agricultural world’s northernmost archipelago, an Administratum overseer blinked at the spots of blood dropping onto his manuscript. He blinked and looked up, where his advisor – Sor Merem, local provost of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica – was twitching and curling into himself.

  The overseer recoiled at the man’s fit, activating his hand-vox. ‘Inform the medicae division that the Telepathica provost has fallen victim to some kind of seizure.’ He almost laughed, seeing the man collapse and smack his head on the table edge on the way down. Bloody drool spurted from his lips.

  ‘What madness is this?’ the overseer half-laughed, biting back his unease.

  Shouting reached his ears from elsewhere in the building. Other astropaths? Their guardians and keepers? The poor fools ‘gifted’ with the sacred speech were never stable, never healthy – each one rendered blind and feeble by their soulbinding to the Golden Throne. Shouting in the halls was commonplace as they sent and received their
many messages each night. Each one would burn out in under a decade. The overseer didn’t relish the fact – it was simply the way of things.

  The provost was thudding the back of his head on the stone floor now, beating himself bloody and biting his tongue. The overseer didn’t understand. The provost was newly appointed only the previous season. He had many years of use before burning out.

  ‘Merem?’ the overseer asked the twitching body. Froth at the man’s lips was the only answer. His eyes were wide, terrified by something only he could see.

  ‘Overseer Kalkus,’ his hand-vox crackled.

  ‘Speak,’ the overseer said. ‘I demand to know what’s happening.’

  ‘Overseer… the–’

  ‘The what? Who is this?’

  Something screamed down the vox connection. It didn’t sound human. The overseer would find exactly how true that was in a handful of minutes, when it reached his door.

  On New Plateau, it came to be known as the Night of the Mad Song, as tens of thousands of hive residents dreamed the same torturous dreams.

  On Jyre, the central fortress of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica was destroyed in a riot from within, that spread onto the streets and lasted three weeks before the planetary defence forces quelled the uprising.

  On Garanel IV, almost all off-world business within Capital City was brought to its knees by an outbreak of an unnamed contagion in the astropathic guild’s sector of the city.

  The song carried on into the night.

  The world Orvalas.

  The world itself was largely worthless. Its ore deposits had long since been carved bare, leaving great, dry canyon-scars across the planet’s tectonic visage. What few humans remained maintained an astropathic relay station in high orbit. Their sworn duty was as simple as it was vital: to interpret the dreams, images, nightmares and voices of the warp reaching them from other worlds, and relay them onward down the 001.2.57718 Astra Telepathica Duct.

  Sixteen minutes after its contingent of psychically-gifted souls received the mortis-cry from several worlds elsewhere along the Duct, the astropathic relay station at Orvalas went dark. No trace of its further existence was ever noted in Imperial record. All five hundred and forty souls aboard were entered into the Adeptus Astra Telepathica’s Chronicles of the Lost, at their headquarter bastion on the world Heras, Corosia Subsector, in Ultima Segmentum.

  The final astropathic transmissions from Orvalas reached thirty-four other worlds, strengthening the bleak song past its already potent voice.

  It took four hours.

  One by one, she killed them with her secret sight. Each of them looked into her hidden eye, and though she never knew what they saw, she knew what would happen. The first howled and reached for her with handless arms, banging its amputated wrists against her face as it died. A single glance at her third eye was all it took. No more lethal weapon existed in all of humanity’s long and bloody history. Any sailor of the stars knew that to look into a Navigator’s warp eye was to know death. No tales existed of what the doomed ones ever saw in those depths. No one had ever lived to tell of it.

  Octavia had her own guesses, though. Her tutors had hinted of their own research, and of archival evidence noted by previous scholars. Her bloodline’s priceless mutation allowed her immunity to the warp’s taint, but for one without Navigator blood, the third eye was a death sentence. Each of these poor, excruciated remnants looked through the window into Chaos Incarnate. Their minds opened to the horror beyond the veil, and their mortal forms ruptured, unable to contain it.

  Some of them simply expired, their spirits at last drifting from the tortured husks that contained them. Others twitched against their restraints, possessing a vitality they’d lacked at any other time, writhing as they died from agonising organ failure. Several of them burst in front of her, drenching her with stinking viscera. Jagged shards of bone cut and bruised her with each disgusting detonation, and the air soon turned thick with the reek. She had blood on her tongue and shit on her face by the time she’d killed the seventh.

  By the twelfth, she was drooling herself, trembling, bleeding from her third eye. By the fifteenth, she could barely stand. By the eighteenth, she could no longer recall who she was.

  She passed out as she murdered the nineteenth.

  Talos didn’t let her fall. He gripped the back of her head in his gauntleted hand, forcing her unconscious visage into the faces of those doomed to die. He held her secret eye open with the tip of one finger, slaying wherever he aimed her limp body.

  By the end, she was barely breathing. Her attendants rushed to her, but the Night Lord warned them back with a glare.

  ‘I will take her back to her chamber.’ He opened his vox-link with a moment’s concentration. A rune flashed live on his retinal display. ‘Variel, attend to the Navigator in her chambers. She is wounded from her efforts.’

  ‘As you wish,’ crackled back the Flayer’s reply. ‘First Claw awaits you on the bridge, Talos. Will you finally tell us what you’ve been doing in there for the last four hours?’

  ‘Yes,’ Talos replied. ‘Yes, I will.’

  First Claw gathered around the command throne. The hololithic table’s anaemic blue light flickered against their armour as they watched a growing cross-section of the galaxy, increasingly expansive in scope. First, it showed a single system; then several nearby; soon, it was displaying a wide swathe of Ultima Segmentum, with auspex corrosion leaving the picture hazy and indistinct in many places.

  ‘Here.’ Talos gestured with the point of his golden sword. The Blade of Angels gently carved through the misty hololithic, in a loose arc that covered hundreds upon hundreds of stars and the worlds enslaved to them.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ Cyrion asked.

  Talos removed his helm, resting it on the table edge. His black eyes never left the shimmering three-dimensional display.

  ‘A galactic ballet,’ he said with a crooked smile. ‘More specifically, you are looking at the Zero-Zero-One point Two point Five-Seven-Seven-One-Eight Astra Telepathica Duct.’

  ‘Oh,’ Cyrion nodded, none the wiser. ‘Of course. How foolish of me.’

  Talos pointed to world after world in turn. ‘Each Astra Telepathica Duct is as unique as a fingerprint. One might be created by artifice and intent: several worlds being colonised in alignment near stable warp transit routes, allowing the psychic dreamers on each planet to speak across the untold distance. Others are born of chance and happenstance, boosted by the warp itself, or by a simple twist of fate that allows a number of disparate worlds the chance to call to each other across the solar winds.

  ‘The Imperium has hundreds of these ducts,’ Talos was smiling now. ‘They grow, they fade, they rise and degrade, always in flux. With few other ways to make astropathy even an iota more reliable, there is little other choice. And still, it is an art of casting runestones and heeding whispers from nowhere. Utilising a duct is no stroke of genius. But this one… What we did here, brothers…’

  Mercutian leaned forward, shaking his head. ‘Blood of the False Emperor,’ he swore. ‘Talos, this was your plan?’

  The prophet gave a sadist’s smile.

  Cyrion watched the arc of stars and worlds for a few more moments before looking at his brothers.

  ‘Wait.’ Realisation sank in, running through his blood as an unwelcome chill. ‘Wait. You’ve just sent over a hundred astropathic mortis-cries through an established psychic duct?’

  ‘I have indeed.’

  Mercutian’s voice had the edge of panic. ‘You killed them with… with a Navigator. That’s what you were doing in there, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘This is bigger than us, Talos,’ Mercutian said. ‘So much bigger than us. I admire you for the ambitious spear thrust at the crag cat’s heart, but if this works, the retaliation will wipe us from the face of history.’


  Talos’s expression never changed.

  ‘Will you stop smiling?’ Cyrion asked him. ‘I’m not used to it. You’re making my skin crawl.’

  ‘What do you anticipate will happen?’ asked Mercutian. ‘At the very least, this will isolate several worlds for decades. At worst, it will devastate them.’

  Talos nodded again. ‘I know.’

  ‘Then speak,’ Mercutian pressed. ‘Stop grinning and speak. Our lives could be measured in hours.’

  The prophet sheathed his sword again. ‘The idea came to me when Deltrian first constructed the Shriek. His craft was to turn fear and pain into a source of power. It made fear into a weapon once more. Terror became a means to an end, rather than the end itself.’ Talos met their eyes, lowering all pretence of grandeur. ‘I needed that. I needed to focus on a life worth living.’

  Cyrion nodded. Mercutian watched in silence. Uzas stared into the shimmering hololithic; whether or not he heard the prophet’s words was anyone’s guess.

  Cyrion turned slightly, realising the entire command deck had fallen silent. Talos was no longer addressing First Claw. He was speaking to the hundreds of mortals and servitors on the bridge, most of whom were now watching the prophet to the exclusion of all else. He’d never seen this side of his brother before. Here was a glimpse of what might yet be – a warrior ready to assume the mantle of leadership; a warlord ready to live up to his vision of what the Eighth Legion once was, and could be again.

  And it was working. Cyrion could see it in their eyes. Talos’s mix of hesitant confidence and vulnerable fanaticism had them enraptured.

  ‘Tsagualsa,’ Talos said, his voice softer now. ‘Our refuge, and second home. To find it crawling with vermin left a bitter trail on my tongue. But why punish them? Why destroy these weak, lost colonists? Their sin was nothing more than drifting through the warp to a world that offered cold welcome. That was no crime, except perhaps one of misfortune. And yet, there they were. Millions of them. Lost. Alone. Prey, scratching in the dirt. How poetic, to find them here, of all places. Rather than punish them for punishment’s sake, we could use them. What better weapon to wield against the Imperium than the souls of its own lost children?’