by Dan Abnett
‘We give them another five hours,’ said Heth. ‘That’s my word on it. Five hours, then we send in more scouts. The first thing Daylight will do is set up a workable uplink or send some kind of signal.’
Maskar looked at Kiran. There was no love lost between the Navy man and the Guard commander, but they were thinking the same thing. Heth, a High Lord, was painfully out of touch. He clearly thought the Adeptus Astartes immortal. There were certain situations, certain conditions, certain environments, that nothing could survive. They were both working men, fighting men, and they had seen how bad it could actually get, not how bad it could be imagined from a throne in the Palace.
‘Move the picket ships in closer,’ Admiral Kiran told his deck officers. ‘Have them despatch more long-range probes.’
‘Probes will be obliterated, just like the last spread,’ said Maskar.
‘Some may survive,’ replied Kiran curtly. ‘Even if one of them survives to send back a millisecond of data, it will help. Besides, with the picket ships closer to the atmospheric rim, we can try penetrating deeper with auspex and primary sensors.’
Heth nodded. The deck officers hurried to their stations and began to relay instructions.
They watched the strategium display as the reinforcement fleet began to move into its new spread, circling the stricken planet. Indicator lights and icons drifted like sunlight dapples across the topographic grid. In the lower portion of the strategium’s vast hololithic array, columns of data spread, jumbled and reassembled, processing the energetic flux and signature of the planet. Kiran had never seen a planetary body generate so much wild and contradictory data so rapidly.
‘Wait!’ he said, suddenly.
He crossed to one of the observation consoles and shoved two sensor-adepts out of his way. He began to manipulate the controls himself.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Heth.
Kiran didn’t reply immediately. Most of the crew in the huge bridge space were watching him. Kiran irritably yanked off his gloves so he could better manipulate the control surfaces. His fingers wound back the brass dials and adjusted the ivory sliders until he had recaptured the data-stream information from a few moments before.
‘There,’ he said.
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking at,’ Maskar ventured.
‘Admiral, please elucidate,’ said Heth.
‘I know what I’m seeing,’ said Kiran, ‘and I’m sure my senior officers do too.’ In truth, many of them hadn’t immediately recognised it. Few had Kiran’s years of experience, and few had seen as much cosmological data speed by them as the admiral had, but given a few seconds, with the data-stream artificially suspended and frozen, they could pick it up.
‘A ghost,’ said the primary auspex supervisor.
‘A ghost,’ agreed Kiran with a grin.
‘It could just be an imaging artifact,’ said the gunnery officer.
‘Or the echo of a piece of debris blown out by the surface disruption?’ suggested the oldest of the navigation adepts, running the same data through his own, handheld quantifier.
‘I don’t believe it is,’ said Kiran. ‘I think that’s a ghost, the ghost of a friend.’
Heth and Maskar moved closer to the vast display, trying to work out what everyone seemed to be seeing.
‘This blip?’ asked the Lord Commander Militant. ‘This shadow here against the relative lower hemisphere of the planet?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Kiran. ‘Sensorus! Have the advancing picket ships direct their full-gain auspex and detector grids at that shadow. And the fleet too, for what it’s worth. Address all our scanning arrays, passive and active, at what the Lord Commander calls “that blip” and have the data streamed to my console.’
‘But what is it?’ asked Maskar.
‘It’s a ship, my dear general,’ said Kiran. ‘One of ours.’
Twenty
Ardamantua – orbital
The ship emerged from the elemental fury surrounding Ardamantua, rising out of the radioactive soup and lashing ocean of charged particles like a wreck brought up from the seabed. Streams of energy and magnetic backwash, lurid and phosphorescent, spilled back into the pulsing blister of gravitational madness encasing the planet.
The ship rose, powered by its own half-failing engines, summoned by the frantic hails from Kiran’s ships, voices that gave it a direction to head in. It was ailing and damaged, they could see that. Many decks were blown out and the hull was ruptured as though titanic battles had been waged on every level. At least one of its main engines was dead and bleeding clouds of lethal atomic blood into the vacuum.
Two of Kiran’s most powerful cruisers, at the admiral’s direction, moved in closer to the struggling revenant and secured tractor beams, slowly hauling back and assisting its desperate ascent from the cauldron of seething cosmological destruction.
‘Identity?’ asked Lord Commander Militant Heth.
‘It’s Aggressor-class, my lord,’ said Kiran, ‘which means it has to be either the Amkulon or the Ambraxas. They were the two Aggressor-class cruisers assigned to the Chapter Master’s undertaking.’
‘Keel number and auto-broadcast codes confirm it is the Amkulon, sir,’ a sensory officer announced.
‘Let’s raise her now she’s clear of the backwash,’ said Kiran. He walked over to the main communication station, where plugged-in operators and servitors worked at the steep banks of titanium keys. They looked as though they were attempting to play some nightmarishly complex cathedral pipe organ, out of which only the clacks and taps of their keys would issue.
‘Connect me,’ said Kiran.
Eerie squeals and screams suddenly blew up out of the vox-speakers, the ambient sound of space being tortured by radiation and gravity. Beeping and pulsing signals resolved out of the screams. Hololithic energies crackled around the cable-fed and rack-mounted hoop of the station’s projector array, and then an image began to shimmer into place, suspended inside the rim of the hoop like soapy water inside a child’s bubble-blower.
There was a great deal of distortion. They could see a face, but it seemed like a face as seen through a white veil of mourning, or some cerecloth for funereal binding.
‘This is Admiral Kiran, commanding the reinforcement squadron. I am speaking from the bridge of my vessel, the Azimuth. Amkulon, can you hear me?’
Static. The moaning of vacuum ghosts.
‘Amkulon, Amkulon, this is Azimuth. Can you hear me?’
‘It is my pleasure to confirm that I can, admiral,’ a broken voice said from the projector and the speakers. ‘We thought we were lost. Lost forever. This is Amkulon. This is Amkulon. Shipmistress Aquilinia speaking.’
‘Aquilinia! By the Throne, it’s good to hear your voice,’ said Kiran.
‘Have you come to save us all, admiral? That will be quite a feat. The brave fleet is gone. Ardamantua is dying and it is taking the last of our best along with it.’
‘Shipmistress,’ Heth said, stepping up beside Kiran. ‘Forgive me, this is Lord Commander Militant Heth. I am commanding this taskforce that has come to reinforce and assist the Imperial Fists effort here.’
‘My most honoured lord,’ the pale, half-seen phantom replied. ‘I never expected that a man so great would come for us.’
‘Can you, shipmistress, account for the situation as you understand it? We have precious little data. Can you give any report?’
‘I have maintained my mission log since these events began,’ Aquilinia replied, the edges of her words shaved off by static. ‘I will link the data directly to your cogitators, so you may inload and review the information in full detail. To summarise – we were close to victory. The blisternest was under assault and due to fall. Ground forces had been despatched, and others were preparing to drop. Then the noise bursts began. You will have heard those. First the noise bursts, then the
gravitational anomalies. There were not supposed to be any hazards of that sort in this system, but they ripped through the planet’s nearspace like a plague infection. One of them opened in my starboard drive and crippled us. Saved us, too.’
‘Explain, please, Amkulon,’ instructed the Lord Commander Militant.
‘It nearly brought us down. We had to drop our personnel and troop strengths by boat and teleport. But I managed to arrest our descent by ejecting the damaged core, and we were able to withdraw to a safer high anchor point above the planet where we began repairs. As a result, we were the only vessel a great deal further out when the full gravitational storm erupted. It destroyed the fleet, my lord. I saw ships torn apart, and others fall on fire into the planet. I saw the Lanxium die.’
‘Great God-Emperor!’ Heth whispered.
‘We were far enough out to survive the worst of it, but we were caught inside the wash of the storm, and blinded. All directional input was lost, sir. I could not move for fear of running directly into Ardamantua. I could not move until the sound of your voices showed me which direction was out.’
The battered Amkulon was still pulling clear of the worst spatial distortion. Debris trailed out behind it, whipping back into the gravity well like silver dust. Resolution on the communication image was improving, and the vox quality had got cleaner.
‘The Amkulon was transporting Lotus Gate Company,’ said Maskar to the Lord Commander.
‘Shipmistress?’ called Heth. ‘Did Lotus Gate Company get clear, or are they still with you?’
‘At my instruction,’ she replied, ‘they teleported to the surface. I personally gave Captain Severance the teleport locator wand so that I could recall them if the situation improved. But I lost all contact with the surface. Sir, I did not even know where the surface was. I have kept the locator’s transmission signal on automatic recall, but I fear the captain and his wall are lost to us.’
They could see her on the hololith now. Her bridge was a charred ruin behind her. The image distortion had cleared somewhat, but part of what they had first taken as distortion remained. Shipmistress Aquilinia, and those members of her command crew who were in view, were all swathed head-to-foot in white cloth. It was stained in patches, as if pink fluid was gradually seeping out from within.
‘Radiation burns,’ muttered Kiran. ‘Sweet Throne, I’ve never seen such extensive… They’ve shrouded themselves in protective veils, but they are burned, burned so badly…’
‘Shipmistress,’ Heth announced. ‘We are sending rescue boats to you. Medicae teams will–’
‘Negative,’ she said. Her voice was quiet but firm. ‘We are thoroughly and lethally irradiated, my lord. All of us, poisoned and scorched. We will not survive long. My entire ship is contaminated by the drive damage and utterly deadly. No one must come aboard. To board us is a death sentence.’
‘But–’ Heth protested.
‘You have dragged us from the flames, sir, but we do not have long to live. Stay away. All I can do for you now is present my testament of events and convey all the information I have.’
‘I won’t accept that, shipmistress!’ cried Heth.
‘You must, my lord. A great disaster has overtaken the Imperial Fists here at Ardamantua.’
‘We can plainly see,’ said Kiran, ‘a cosmic event, a gravitational hazard that–’
‘It is not natural, admiral,’ said the shipmistress through the vox-link.
‘Say again?’
‘It is not a natural phenomenon. Ardamantua has not killed us all because of some whim of the universe. This effect is artificial. This location is under direct attack.’
‘Attack?’ echoed Maskar.
‘By what? By the Chromes? The xenoforms?’ asked Heth.
‘I do not believe so, sir,’ answered Aquilinia. ‘There are alien voices in the noise bursts. Listen to them. And watch the rising moon.’
‘Ardamantua has no moon,’ said Kiran.
‘It does now,’ said the shipmistress.
Twenty-One
Ardamantua – orbital
‘That simply cannot be a moon,’ said the Azimuth’s First Navigator, studying the large printout that had been unfolded on the silver display tables of the charting room. ‘It is far, far too close to the planet itself. Look, it is within the very aura of the nearspace disruption. That close, its gravitational effects would split Ardamantua in two.’
‘Am I honestly hearing this?’ asked Heth. ‘We have what appears to be best described as a full-blown gravity storm besetting this planet and coring out the heart of the system, gravitational anomalies all around the nearspace region, and you say–’
‘My lord,’ said the First Navigator. ‘I am quite precise. The gravitational incidents, the disruptions that we are seeing, are considerable. But it is random and it seems to be manufactured by distortions in space. If a planetoid appeared in such close proximity to the world, it would be a much more focused and significant effect. Ardamantua would have shifted in its orbit, perhaps even been knocked headlong. The hazard we are encountering is like sustained damage from a shotgun. A moon… that would be a blow from a power hammer.’
‘But still,’ said Maskar, tapping his finger on the oddly shaded part of the printout. ‘This… What is this?’
‘An imaging artifact,’ said the First Navigator.
‘It’s of considerable size,’ said Maskar.
‘It’s a considerably sized imaging artifact, then, sir.’
‘The Amkulon was an imaging artifact too,’ Heth reminded them quietly. ‘Then it turned out to be a ship.’
‘The physical laws of the universe would simply not permit a moon or other satellite body to move so close to a planet, nor could such a body appear–’
‘I’ve seen daemons,’ Heth growled. ‘Up close. Don’t talk to me about the physical laws of the universe.’
They stood in silence and stared down at the huge printout. The chart room was cool and well-lit, arranged for the study of cosmological documents. The air circulator stirred the edges of the vast vellum sheet that hung over the edges of the silver table.
None of the ships in Kiran’s fleet had been able to detect or resolve anything resembling a moon in the gravitational and radioactive maelstrom surrounding Ardamantua. The printout image had come from the mission log data transmitted to them from the Amkulon. Aquilinia had recorded and stored the auspex scan as she dragged her ship out of its death-dive. This had been shortly before the tumult increased, swallowed her up, and blinded her.
‘We have examined the resolution,’ said one of the several tech-adepts assembled in the chamber. ‘The so-called “moon image” is indeed a ghost. Verifiable data is hard to find, of course, but that object seems to be only partly material, as if it is an echo of something not quite there.’
‘An imaging artifact!’ the First Navigator declared.
‘No, sir,’ said the tech-adept. ‘It is like something trying to emerge. To pass through. To translate. As if through a warp gate.’
‘Hellsteeth!’ cried Heth. ‘Then who or what are we dealing with?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Admiral Kiran, ‘but I place my full-throated support behind your efforts to pursue this, sir, rather than giving it up as a dismal and lost cause. We must find out what is happening here, and who has wrought it. Because if they can move a planetary body here, then they can pretty much move one anywhere, and do anything.’
Twenty-Two
Terra – the Imperial Palace
The meeting done, Wienand dismissed the four interrogators. They rose from their seats, bowed to her, raised their hoods, and left the tower-top chamber.
The Inquisitorial Representative sat alone with her thoughts for a while. There were documents and advisories to review, and her rubricator had been urging her to annotate the latest watch list.
Time enoug
h for all of that later. The morning’s news had been grim – pretty much exactly what she had been anticipating, but grim. Her masters in the three sub-divisions of the Inquisition expected much of her, and they had set her in place among the Twelve to accomplish a great deal, but it was a complicated dance, a matter of balance and timing. The Inquisition was an instrument of the Imperium. It did not set Imperial policy.
Unless it knew best, in which case it could not be seen to set Imperial policy.
Wienand’s quarters were an eight-level suite in the armoured crown of a tower overlooking Bastion Ledge and the Water Gardens. There was not much of a view because of the tower’s ample fortification. Agents of the Inquisition had added defences of a more specialised nature when the tower was acquired for the Representative’s use. The very walls and the armourglass of the windows were threaded with protective wards woven from molecular silver fibres, and potent runes had been discreetly worked into the patterns of decorative ornamentation on the carpets and ceilings. Automatic weapon arrays and intruder denial systems had been retrofitted into every staircase, doorway and floorspace, and most of the servitors were wired for weapon activation at a moment’s notice. The suite was cloaked, in addition, by multiple counter-surveillance fields, and several more exotic effects derived from the esoteric arts that the Inquisition both practised and guarded against. A cone of silence, psychically generated yet psychically opaque, covered the uppermost storeys, and there was even a Mars-built, engine-rated void shield in the tower core that could be activated by voice command.
Wienand rose to her feet. She was dressed in a simple, full-length gown of pale grey wool. Her rosette adorned her wrist, as a bracelet. She felt she should summon her rubricator and begin the day’s correspondence, but she was enjoying the solitude, the calm emptiness of the room.
