Books One to Three Omnibus (Armada Wars)

by R. Curtis Venture

  A hand grabbed for him, glanced off his shoulder. He fell forwards and twisted around as he landed, sliding across the gravel on his back.

  He brought his pistol up in a two-handed grip, firing twice into the chest of the man who had caught up with him. The man went down, falling onto Delanka’s legs, and the soldier kicked out and tugged them free.

  A woman appeared from the mist, her hands outstretched, face pinched in a feral, seeking expression. She saw him scrambling to get up and launched herself at him, shrieking.

  Another two shots, and she went down.

  Delanka did not wait for others to come towards the sounds. He ran and ran and ran.

  By the time the battlement wall of Camp Camillion came into view, he felt as though his organs were about to explode. His lungs burned cold, his sides ached — more so the side where he had been wounded days before — and his leg muscles were beginning to scream at him.

  He stumbled on. The sight of safety, he knew from experience, was not the same thing as safety itself.

  Minutes later, he reached the plasteel module where he had left Halfre with Omin and Caela. He burst through the doorway, half expecting them to be gone.

  “Junn!” Halfre’s eyes were wide. “What happened?”

  He released the seal grips around his neck, and lifted his helmet from his head.

  “I think I found Suster.”

  “Where is he?”

  “In a world of his own. I don’t think he’s Suster any more.”

  Halfre gawped at him, and he could see in her face that she did not understand. Worlds, he had been there in person and he could not fathom it himself.

  He looked around, and saw that Omin was still secured to the support pole by a cable tie. The young man was sat on the floor, his legs either side of the pole, resting his chest and shoulder against it. His back was towards Delanka, but he could see the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest. He was still breathing, at least.

  But there was something more. Tiny movements of the head and neck. Tiny, tiny movements which — in its heightened state — Delanka’s brain told him were significant. He stepped towards Omin, and edged around him.

  Omin’s eyes were closed, but his lips were moving quickly, as if he were reciting something to himself.

  Delanka leaned closer.

  “What are you doing?” Halfre asked.

  “Listening.”

  He leaned closer still. At the very edge of his hearing, he made out Omin’s words.

  “Yes, yes, I feel you yes. And the song is unbroken. Forever the song.”

  The words crawled on Delanka’s skin like alien spores, poured out of a mouth they didn’t belong in.

  “What is it?” Halfre’s voice was strained.

  “I don’t know,” Delanka said.

  A small voice came from behind.

  “Mister?”

  He turned around, and saw Caela looking out at him from an upturned supply crate.

  “Mister, what’s that sound?”

  “I hear it too,” Halfre said. “Quiet!”

  Delanka listened, and his heart sank.

  It was the sound of many footfalls. The sound of people running across grit and gravel, running into the camp.

  They were coming.

  — Book Three —

  The Ravening Deep

  Who shall forbid the eye to weep,

  That saw him, from the ravening deep,

  Pluck’d like the lion’s prey?

  — James Montgomery —

  — Prologue —

  Into the Pit

  Fire. The rancid tang of plastic and metal, black smoke pouring and churning and rolling, the crackle of electricity arcing behind softening wall panels. Dim, obscured, the gaping spaces of the windows, glass gone, smashed away, weak evening light pressing feebly on the toxic air, probing, insufficient.

  Maber Castigon crawled across the tilted floor, reached for the faint glow, strained for freedom.

  Behind him, in the bowels of the facility, another groaning rumble shook the building. Dust seeped from fissures in the ceiling, mocking his predicament as though they were the sands of time. The particles caught on the currents in the air and scattered across his face and hands.

  “No, no, no, NO!”

  He felt the floor jolt beneath his body and begin to give way, just as it had done on the two floors above him. He scrambled for purchase, clawed at the foot of the wall, at the buckling panels that covered the floor of the corridor, at anything he could hold on to.

  Pieces of glass and masonry skittered past him, tumbling and bouncing towards the dark. Towards the empty pit which waited patiently mere metres from his feet. Where it had speared the Eyes and Ears facility.

  The debris rattled over the ragged edge and disappeared into the void, the sounds of its descent fading away to nothing.

  “Fuck!”

  He was moving, unable to stop his body from obeying gravity, and slid towards the edge, chasing the debris into the shadows.

  The hard floor — so reassuring against his body — gave way to nothingness. A brief sense of weightlessness, fringed with vulnerability, and then rushing air. Thickening dark. A cold plunge into its domain, tumbling towards it, helpless.

  And yet the fact remained that he was still alive.

  Castigon had been at the point of defeat just minutes ago, before a hole had been torn through the building. There had been a roaring, grinding crash, the whole corridor had seemed to spasm, and he remembered that peculiar sensation of something huge moving quickly behind him. The windows had blown in, harmless nuggets of safety glass showering across the floor, and part of the ceiling had collapsed. He had sensed Rendir Throam’s weight lifting from his own body, that acute feeling of mortality lifting with it, and he had scrambled to his feet gratefully despite the protestations from his wounds.

  Throam had crouched nearby, and stared past him. Castigon would never forget that face: the counterpart looked as though he had seen the infinite madness beyond the end of time.

  Castigon had turned, witnessed the tail end of it disappearing through the floor, and taken several long seconds to realise that the floor was falling in after it.

  He had turned to run. Foolish in retrospect, he supposed. When the rushing, screaming roar had subsided he had heard the scrape of stones against the building’s metal skeleton, the granular hiss of the crushed mortar which now lubricated the flexing of those girders, the groan of the superstructure trying to absorb the force of the impact. It had seemed as though — like him — the whole building was trying to flee from it.

  Throam had vanished into a hole which opened up to swallow him, and despite the danger to himself Castigon had smiled as the counterpart smashed his forearm on the edge in his vain effort to arrest the fall. But the satisfaction was short-lived; a sickening lurch, and without any other warning there was nothing beneath Castigon’s own feet.

  The floor of the level below had revealed itself to be painfully unyielding. His ankles and knees had not appreciated the awkward landing.

  Throam had been disappearing around the far corner — already sprinting faster than Castigon would have believed he was capable of — shouting into his link. Debris from the ceiling above had bounced off the counterpart’s hunched shoulders, and he had almost fallen before vanishing out of sight altogether.

  There had followed a horrible splintering noise, and another shifting of the floor. It had given way abruptly, a large section sinking into the corridor below, again spilling Castigon onto the next level. That time had been easier on his damaged body; it had tilted down, and he had slid to the floor gracelessly but largely unscathed.

  And that was the same floor which had betrayed him now, collapsing towards the pit which the intruder had gouged through the Eyes and Ears facility.

  His fall into the pit was suspended painfully, his bones jarring with the collision, and he flailed for purchase. Cables. Cables hanging across the hole. He grabbed for them, aware that
the weight of his body was carrying itself around the lifelines, trying to obey gravity’s enticing call.

  Castigon caught a cable in one hand as he dropped, and felt the wrenching of muscles and tendons in his arm and shoulder.

  He held on for dear life.

  Something was happening below him, he sensed. He peered down, tilting his head painfully, and in the gloom he could make out the tapered end of it. It was clearly a fuselage of some sort. A hull. A hull which appeared to be leaking atmosphere.

  The size of it was difficult to process. He looked up, and for the first time realised the scale of the channel it had burrowed through the building. An indigo canvas stared back blankly at him, a crescent of faint light from the setting sun fringing one side, and for a moment he thought he saw tiny flashes high up in the sky of Meccrace Prime.

  There was a distinct hissing below him now, and he looked down again. Sure enough the atmospheric leak had worsened. The strange vessel — if that is what it was — must have been damaged by the impact. A turbid vapour, dark grey in the feeble light which the sky provided, was pouring thickly from different points around the hull.

  There could be anything in that gas, he thought.

  He swung his free arm up, gripped the cable in both hands, and began to pull his body towards one side of the hole. Hand over hand, every metre he moved his injured body seemed to take a painful eternity.

  The vapour below was churning now, a rising sea which had filled the lower levels and had nowhere else to go but up.

  He tried to move faster, forcing his body to comply. Hand over hand, hand over hand, almost at the edge. What if the edge gives way when I stand on it? Deal with that if and when it actually happens Maber; right now you just need to—

  Even through the cable, he felt the building shake with the force of another titanic impact.

  POP.

  The cable tore from the wall without warning, and Castigon was falling once more, still gripping his lifeline. Before he knew what was happening the slack was spent, the cable was at its full extent, and his arms were almost pulled from their sockets. The shock and pain made him let go.

  Down he fell, down into the roiling fog.

  — 01 —

  From the Shadows

  Elm Caden stared without seeing, looking through his hand, through the glass tumbler, through the table. Down through the floor and the levels below, down through the entire City of Peru, down through the waters of the bay, deep into the very skin of Earth.

  Four days. Four days was all it had taken for everything to change.

  His fingers tightened around the tumbler, and the glass tilted to one side. The ice had melted some time ago.

  He lifted his eyes sullenly to watch the performers changing over. A woman in a red satin dress was already taking the stage, adjusting the microphone stand while the previous act lifted his instruments and heaved them away to one side. She loosened a clip, smiled diffidently when the top half of the stand dropped into the lower half, and then raised it until the microphone almost met her glossy lips.

  Caden’s scowl remained. He was vaguely aware that the conversations of the bar’s other patrons had faded in polite anticipation of the act, but he did not join them in their expectancy.

  How could anyone enjoy music, knowing what he knew?

  “Meet me on Damastion,

  Her beauty reigns supreme,

  And though her night does fall, it’s said,

  The stars will dance her dream.”

  His brain registered the soft, caramel flow of her voice, the low register she purred out into the bar. But his thoughts were bent on the outrages of the past week, and not even the collective efforts of all the artists in Peru would ever manage to lift his soul at this moment. Not even if every one of them sang of the beauty of his home planet.

  Doctor Bel-Ures had been taken away from him, the moment they had arrived at Fort Herses. That was his first issue. And oh, what an issue. ‘Debriefing’ they had called it. The entire Meccrace system had fallen to an enemy invasion in a matter of hours, yet his one chance to learn why had been snatched right out of his hands.

  Betombe and Santani had both been taken off active duty, despite their heroic efforts to protect the Imperial Combine and human lives. Hearing the news of their suspensions had been an insult to Caden’s ears.

  Eyes and Ears — that vaunted, hallowed intelligence bureau — had let one of their own fall into the bondage of the enemy. And nobody had noticed!

  But worst of all, they had not let Caden go back.

  Meccrace Prime is lost to us, Fleet Admiral Bel-Messari had told him. Off limits, understand? One man’s life is hardly relevant.

  Rendir Throam is relevant to me, Caden had told him.

  Counterparts are easily sourced, was the cool reply.

  In that moment, Caden had struggled to think of anyone he had wished to end more than Bel-Messari.

  As it happened, they had still not furnished him with a replacement for Throam. Correction: successor. Nobody would ever come close to replacing Ren. Nobody could.

  You’re a stooge.

  “Shut up.”

  Caden glanced around, unsure whether he had replied out loud or just inside his own head. Nobody appeared to be paying him the least bit of attention.

  You do all the work, they shut you out. What would you call it?

  I liked you better when you were a little ball of nothing, he thought to himself.

  The Emptiness faced him, perched at the edge of a chair. It leaned its pallid form forwards, hunching, long spindly arms crossed at the edge of the table, and smiled its ugly smile.

  Why are you even here? I thought we had put ourselves back together?

  Perhaps you still aren’t ready to accept that I am a part of you.

  You’re damned right there.

  He looked away from the Emptiness, trying to ignore its unwavering gaze. Its appearance in the bar had startled him, that much was true, but that had been nothing some strong spirits could not remedy. At some point he would worry about what its manifestation suggested about his mental state. That would have to be another time; right now he had other things on his mind.

  He thought instead about the battle footage Thande had showed him aboard Disputer during their retreat to the Herses system. The sight of the Imperial Eighth Fleet firing on itself had unsettled his nerves, but the arrival of an entire battle group of dreadships had shredded them.

  The dreadships were gargantuan, powerful, and they seemed unstoppable. Even the mighty flagship Fearless — fitted as she was with a newly developed weapon system — had only managed to cripple two of them before being driven off.

  He imagined just one of those leviathan frames silhouetted against the azure skies of Mother Earth, and shuddered.

  What was worse still was the prospect of widespread Rasa infiltration. Gordl Branathes had shown Caden first hand how dangerously perfect was the guise that each of them wore. Nobody had noticed that the monitor was not himself until unresolvable inconsistencies appeared in his behaviour, and even then the discovery of Branathes’ true allegiance had largely been down to guesswork on the part of his subordinate, Occre Brant.

  It’s in hand, was all Bel-Messari would tell him. We’ll root them out.

  How? Caden had asked.

  The admiral had simply smiled, then walked away.

  “There’s something in the shadows,

  It watches every move.

  And though we’ll fight with all our might,

  Humanity will lose.”

  Several seconds passed before the words penetrated Caden’s conscious mind, and he looked up towards the stage. The singer smiled blissfully, swaying to and fro in time with the music, enjoying the interval between her own verses.

  “What did she…?” He muttered.

  Are you asking me?

  Caden glared at the Emptiness, acutely aware that he was visually admonishing himself.

  “There’s something in the da
rkness,

  It’s coming for us all.

  And though we’ll try to drive it back,

  The Many Worlds will fall.”

  He was standing before he knew what he was doing, lurching towards the stage, knocking the table as he passed it and sending tumblers over the edge to smash on the floor.

  She was swaying again, her tranquil smile opening to reveal her teeth when her eyes settled on his face. He saw her eyes widen, her expression twist like wax into one of surprise and uncertainty.

  At the edge of the stage, he stopped beneath her.

  She looked to the side briefly, as if someone there might explain what was happening, then turned her face back to him.

  “Why did you sing that?” He shouted up at her, yelling over the backing track.

  “What?” She said back, the microphone amplifying the question.

  “Why did you sing those words? About the darkness? About humanity losing?”

  “What are you… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Her face was one of genuine shock, he knew that much. Two men had appeared at the side of the stage, looks passing between them as if they were each hoping the other had some idea of what to do next.

  “Leave her alone,” someone behind him was shouting. “Time for you to go home, you drunk!”

  “It’s my own song,” she pleaded. “I didn’t say anything about darkness.”

  He turned away from her and walked straight to the exit.

  You did that, he thought. I don’t know how or why, but you did that.

  Nothing to do with me.

  • • •

  Outside the bar the sun beat down upon the concourse, blazing dutifully in a clear sky. Caden raised his hand to shield his eyes, and looked up towards the edge of the next level of the city. If he walked under its lip, then through the corridors of the tower’s core, he could stay in the cool of the shade and then in avenues lit by less harsh reflected light.