Atlas Infernal

by Rob Sanders

  As the dull glow of revived runescreens and instrument panels lit the rogue trader’s command deck, Czevak ran over to check their heading; their degree of declination and celestial ascension.

  With the Impossible Fortress beginning to drift away, Klute called out. ‘Shouldn’t we pull off also? I mean, how long can the reactor’s plasma core last?’

  In answer to the inquisitor’s question the rogue trader suddenly rocked as an explosion rippled through her starboard side. Thrown across the transept and into the pulpit rail, Torres and her bridge crew grasped for handholds. Steam from the vents began to thin and die and the rumble of the plasma reactor was conspicuous by its absence in the frozen silence of the Kryonova.

  ‘Damage report,’ the Torres ordered.

  ‘We just lost the starboard sub-light engine column,’ her lieutenant said grimly. ‘Enginarium critical but no casualties. Losing speed. Warp drive failing. Captain, the Geller field is collapsing.’

  ‘Not this; not again,’ Torres said.

  ‘Hold your damn course,’ Czevak roared as breath once again began to rime on the air and the lancet screens began to cloud.

  ‘Czevak!’ Klute called in desperation.

  ‘Dropping,’ the deck officer announced, counting down the vessel’s doom. ‘Sixty per cent… Geller field at fifty-five per cent.’

  ‘Czevak!’

  The High Inquisitor wasn’t taking his eyes off the misting lancet screens. The Kryonova was so close now that the raging, blue surface of the star dominated the command deck’s field of vision. Even where it didn’t, the darkness of space was writhing with the airbrushed negative outlines of soul-hungry daemons and warp entities that thrashed in the void like swarms of fish in a vanishing, dry-season pool. The immaterial predators had hunting grounds here by the Kryonova’s cold trap. The creatures feasted on the crews of unwary vessels and the populations of unfortunate planetoids caught in the riftstorms of the Scorpento Maestrale.

  ‘There!’ Czevak called, pointing to a black ellipse situated in the star’s equatorial east. It looked like a sun spot against the Kryonova’s roaring, blue radiance but grew in size as the Malescaythe approached.

  ‘Forty per cent…’

  The rogue trader drifted through the angry void with inertial force, like a javelin tossed at a distant target. Once again, the Malescaythe began to creak and moan but it was impossible to tell whether the vessel was being ravaged by the crushing attentions of the deep, stellar cold or the diabolical warp entities pressing against the collapsing integrity of the Geller field.

  All eyes were on the sun spot as it grew. Upon first sighting the blemish it had appeared tiny. As the frost-blooming vessel closed the distance, its actual dimensions were revealed. It was huge. Much larger than it had seemed. Much larger than the ship.

  ‘Is that…’ Torres began, amazed.

  ‘It’s a webway portal,’ Klute said, barely suspending his own disbelief.

  ‘Thirty per cent, captain,’ the lieutenant informed Torres urgently. ‘The Geller field is about to collapse.’

  As the Malescaythe’s void-skimming prow drifted at the blackness the interdimensional energies of the warp gate blistered to life, arcing furiously across the portal’s immense expanse and tessellating the reality of a cavernous webway tunnel beyond.

  ‘By the Throne, it’s opening,’ Klute marvelled.

  ‘And not by us,’ Czevak said, almost to himself. ‘Somebody’s expecting us.’

  The rogue trader pierced the transdimensional static of the portal entrance and drifted painfully inside. The Malescaythe was a certified wreck of a vessel, a dead mountain of metal aimed from an impossible distance at a target it could not have known existed. Its amazed crew stared through reinforced portholes in wonder and delight as the ship exchanged the terrors of the Eye – both environmental and daemonic – for the serene, immeasurable vastness of an interdimensional dry dock.

  As the bridge took in the magnificent spectacle of the webway, Czevak turned and faced Klute and Torres. Of course, the High Inquisitor had seen such sights many times before.

  ‘Captain, might I recommend commencing an extensive programme of repairs,’ Czevak put to the astonished rogue trader captain. ‘Can I suggest starting with life support and the heating? Is it just me, or is it cold in here?’

  Flourish

  Epilogue

  Hull exterior, Rogue trader Malescaythe, The webway

  CHORUS

  Enter CZEVAK, alone

  High Inquisitor Bronislaw Czevak slipped the goggles from his head to admire his handiwork. Dumping the spray gun, hose and heavy canister on the hull, he examined his paint job on the base of the newly erected, topside, forward-thorax-west ether vane. The High Inquisitor did not count among his talents artistry or engineering – he was far more adept at destroying things than fixing them – but conceded that he’d learnt a great deal about both over the past weeks.

  Hanging in the safety of a webway dry dock, Captain Torres had made good on a guilt-ridden promise the inquisitor had made to help – primarily in using the Lost Fornical of Urien-Myrdyss to acquire the vast array of parts, materials and specialist equipment needed to repair the horrifically damaged Malescaythe, but also in affecting some of those repairs and aesthetic improvements. Between them, the Techmarine Saul Torqhuil and Enginseer Autolycus oversaw the refit and the rogue trader crew’s round-the-clock efforts to get the vessel both void and warp-worthy. The ancient vessel still looked like hell – even with her repairs and paint job – but Captain Torres didn’t seem to mind. The captain was just happy to have steerage and propulsion systems back at her disposal, appreciating the implied honour of a veteran’s scars.

  Repairs were not restricted to the Malescaythe either. While Epiphani Mallerstang and the daemonhost Hessian recovered from their own soul-scars, the warp-seer’s gift slowly returning, Saul Torqhuil had started work on refurbishing the plates of his sacred armour and rebuilding his servo-harness and myriad of heavy-duty appendages. His first priority, however, had been a bionic substitute for his hand, which Czevak fancied was a thing of intricate beauty and more dextrous than the original. Dextrous enough to craft the bionic replacement for his primary heart that now thumped inside the Adeptus Astartes’ mighty chest. The High Inquisitor didn’t really know if any of them would forgive him for the trials and sacrifices of his acquaintance – but he was still alive, which was a good sign – and none of them had announced their intention to leave the rogue trader, which for most had come to represent a kind of a home in the unnatural hostility of the Eye.

  Czevak dropped the paint gun and canister down a service hatch to an enginarium serf and told her to take them to Klute, who had been helping down below. He rubbed the paint from his hands on a set of robes Klute had lent him or that Czevak had stolen – he couldn’t quite remember which. The High Inquisitor began to wander the hull exterior, taking in the colossal dimensions of the webway tunnel that tempted the traveller with the draw of its endless expanse.

  He heard footfalls on the hull metal and turned. It was Vespasi-Hann. Eldar. Harlequin. Shadowseer. The warlock was going through the motions of lazy acrobatics, moving from the tips of his fingers to the toes of his boots, the kaleidoscopic chequers and stripes of his Harlequin coat and its Domino field creating a Catherine wheel of colour. His mirror-mask was the same, however, a silver, unreadable blankness that as ever, hid the psyker’s face and intentions. The handstands, flips and carting continued with murderous agility, with Czevak standing still in its midst.

  ‘That supposed to scare me, Harlequin?’ Czevak finally called across the armour plating. ‘Come to finish what you started?’

  The Shadowseer continued his ominous performance. Czevak looked over his shoulder. He could tell the rest of the Harlequin troupe were there, the Great Harlequin playing with the stalks of his tall plume of pink, the half-masked carnival scorpion and the broad-chested Death Jester, leaning on the scythe attachment of his shrieker cannon. All sat
about the hull architecture of the Malescaythe, just as indifferent as the Shadowseer. Czevak turned back to the psyker-swordsman.

  ‘Are you really here?’ the High Inquisitor asked him. ‘Is this really happening and if so is it happening now? Sometimes, I swear I cannot tell.’

  The Shadowseer jumped into a roll but by the time he was back on his feet he had produced his willowy witchblade from a sheath on his back.

  ‘Perhaps this is a dream,’ Czevak pressed on. ‘Perhaps it all is, but yours or mine? Or a performance – a piece of artifice, played out before the expectations of an eager audience. I was once privileged with a performance of the Dance Without End, at Iyanden. I’m told your masques only dramatise events that are significant to the destiny of your race. Am I a significant event?’ the inquisitor said to the warlock.

  The Shadowseer closed in predatory elegance.

  ‘Is my story about to end, Harlequin?’

  The witchblade sang through the air in practiced, leaping, back-arching flourishes, the psyker’s grace both art and war.

  ‘During the Dance Without End, Shadowseers like yourself used hallucinogenics and psychic manipulations to make us live their tale. We were as one with it. Is that what you do, Seer of Shadows, to make me fear you as I do?’

  Czevak could feel it, like the closing of a ritual, the Harlequin moving in for the attack.

  ‘Let me thank you, Vespasi-Hann of the Harlequinade, for saving my life on many occasions.’ Czevak gestured at the webway around him. ‘For opening the gate and allowing me in. I could not be sure, but I wagered you would want me back as much as Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, perhaps more. For that, I cannot give thanks. I will not return to the Black Library of Chaos a prisoner. And since I cannot live like a hunted animal – ghosted by you and your troupe – with a mind not my own, I think you know what I ask of you. What only you can deliver.’

  Czevak turned his back slowly to the Shadowseer, resting his hands in his robes and closed his eyes. He heard the footfalls, the gymnastic prowl of the alien. He felt the darkness of a familiar fear creep into his heart. The Shadowseer was suddenly there behind him, his mirror-mask peering over Czevak’s shoulder and the witchblade trembling with immaterial insistence, a hair’s breadth away from the inquisitor’s exposed throat.

  ‘Is this what you came for, Harlequin?’ Czevak whispered. In the inquisitor’s hands, held at his chest, was the Atlas Infernal. The golden, lightweight armour of its casket-covers open. Its pump spine sighing rhythmically. The parchment-stretched flesh of the Sister of Silence on display – the blacksoul’s ancient lifeblood coursing through the ever-changing labyrinth of arteries, veins and capillaries, winding through the pages.

  Screams. Everywhere. Eldritch and involuntary.

  The witchblade clattered to the hull and smouldered. The Shadowseer was gone. Czevak span around, with the antique Imperial tome held out in front of him. The Shadowseer was on the floor, repelled like a daemon from an icon of faith, writhing and squirming away from the inquisitor – unsuccessfully. As Czevak approached he looked about; the troupe had all been closing and had been stunned by the inquisitor’s gambit. The Death Jester was doubled over; rich, red gore spurting through the teeth of his skull-face and onto the armour plating. The half-mask stumbled about the edge of the hull by the ether vane, gauntlets at her temples and riveblades and fist spike crossed above her head. Whether by accident or design, she slipped from the hull and fell off the side of the Malescaythe, tumbling past the rogue trader’s cannon batteries and through the vast emptiness beneath the ship. The Great Harlequin was staggering at him, plume bouncing wildly and slender plasma pistols clutched in each quaking hand. The troupe leader dropped the weapons and hit the metal hull with about as little grace as Czevak had ever witnessed an eldar exhibit. Beaten and soul-scorched by the nullsphere of psychic blankness the pages of the Atlas Infernal radiated, the Great Harlequin and Death Jester phase-field jumped from the danger.

  Vespasi-Hann was beyond such survival instincts. His burnt out mind could find no other expression of this than clawing at his mirror-mask. Czevak knelt down with the Atlas Infernal beside the afflicted alien.

  ‘How does it feel, Harlequin? Fear?’ Czevak put to the Shadowseer. ‘Listen and listen well. I will not be a pawn in some foreseen game of destiny, arranged by a visionary farseer of your race. That’s his Path. My path is my own. I will stop Ahzek Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, whether I am destined to do so or not.’

  The High Inquisitor watched the Shadowseer scratch at the clasps on his faceplate, gore bubbling and frothing up from behind it and running down the silvery surface of the mirror mask. ‘It’s over, Harlequin,’ Czevak told the dying xenos. ‘I don’t want to see your face. You will always be just a masque to me.’

  Czevak stood up. He could hear boots coming across the hull towards him. Raimus Klute arrived, breathless, robes flowing and shotgun pistol held up in one hand.

  ‘I heard screams,’ he said. Then he set his eyes on the felled Harlequin. Not some paranoid distraction or feverish hallucination, but a living, breathing menace that had been stalking Czevak through time and space. As the Shadowseer’s fingertips fell from the mirror-mask and a pool of blood began to gather on the hull under the Harlequin’s head, Vespasi-Hann lived and breathed no more.

  Czevak nodded.

  Grabbing the sleeve of the Shadowseer’s Harlequin coat and pulling, Czevak tumbled the alien’s body out of it. The eldar’s corpse rolled unceremoniously across the polished surface of the sloping hull and then off the edge of the ship. Slipping out of Klute’s robes, he handed the paint-smeared garment back to the inquisitor and pulled on the Harlequin coat with the static crackle of its Domino field.

  ‘That’s better,’ the High Inquisitor said to himself.

  ‘It’s not safe to stay here any longer,’ Klute said.

  ‘Well, it’s not safe to return to the Imperium,’ Czevak countered evenly.

  ‘It’s not safe for us “anywhere”,’ Klute concluded.

  ‘And with us “anywhere”, it won’t be safe for Ahriman either,’ Czevak told his friend. ‘Are they ready?’

  Klute nodded and handed him a vox-bead.

  ‘Captain Torres, you may begin your test run of the sub-light engines.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ the rogue trader captain returned and through his boots and the hull, Czevak felt the rumble of the sub-light engine columns coming to new life. As the Malescaythe gently pulled away from its dry dock moorings and the exotic brilliance of the webway’s interdimensional walls began to drift by, the vox-bead chirped.

  ‘Destination, inquisitor?’

  Standing atop the magnificence of the battle-scarred rogue trader, the inquisitors gave each other wry glances. Czevak closed the Atlas Infernal and slipped it into the inside pocket of his Harlequin coat.

  ‘Anywhere,’ he replied.

  Finis

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rob Sanders is a freelance writer, who spends his nights creating dark visions for regular visitors to the 41st millennium to relive in the privacy of their own nightmares.

  By contrast, as Head of English at a local secondary school, he spends his days beating (not literally) the same creativity out of the next generation in order to cripple any chance of future competition. He lives off the beaten track in the small city of Lincoln, UK. His first fiction was published in Inferno! magazine.

  For TC, Jonah and Elliot - you know why...

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  Published in 2011 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

  Cover illustration by Stef Kopinski

  © Games Workshop Limited 2011 All rights reserved.

  Black Library, the Black Library logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated marks, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer universe are either ®, TM and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2010, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world.
All rights reserved.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978-0-85787-163-3

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  See the Black Library on the internet at

  blacklibrary.com

  Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

  www.games-workshop.com

  eBook license

  This license is made between:

  Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and