[Night Lords 01] - Soul Hunter

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden - (ebook by Undead)

  “Yes, lord. A long time. The afflictions are getting longer.”

  “They are. Who was the last to come to me?”

  “Lord Cyrion, seven hours ago. I thought you were going to die.”

  “For a while, so did I.” There was the serpentine hiss of venting air pressure as the demigod removed his helm. In the low light, Septimus could just make out his master’s smooth features, and the eyes as black as pools of tar.

  “What did you dream?” the slave asked.

  “Dark omens and a dead world. Make your way to my arming chambers and make preparations. I must speak with the Exalted.”

  “Preparations?” Septimus hesitated. “Another war?”

  “There is always another war. But first, we must meet someone. Someone who will prove vital to our survival. We must go on a journey.”

  “To where, lord?”

  The demigod gave a rare smile. “Home.”

  I

  NOSTRAMO

  A lone asteroid spun in the stillness of space. Tens of millions of kilometres from the closest planetary body, it was clearly no natural satellite belonging to any of the planets in the sector.

  This was good. This was very, very good.

  To the keen eyes and knowing smile of Kartan Syne, the hunk of rock twisting endlessly through the dead space of Ultima Segmentum was a thing of beauty. Or rather, what it represented was a thing of beauty, because what it represented was money. A great deal of money.

  His vessel, a well-armed bulk trader by the delightfully ostentatious name Maiden of the Stars, sat in a loose orbit around the vast asteroid below. The Maiden was a big girl, and she threw her weight around when it came to tight manoeuvres, but while Syne hated a little meat on his women, he loved a little bulk to his ship’s hull. The sacrifice of speed for greater profit was worth it.

  Pirates were no issue. The Maiden bristled with weapons batteries, all bought with the profits of his mining runs. Often he’d settle for a finder’s fee, but in cases like this—and cases like this were few and far between—he felt the need to fall into orbit and set his servitor teams on the surface to start digging. They were down there now, lobotomised lords of their own little mining colony. It had only been a handful of hours since planetfall, but already his automated crews were hard at work.

  Lounging in his command throne, Syne watched the occulus screen as it displayed the asteroid spinning below, grey-skinned and silver-veined, a massive shard of untapped profit. He glanced at the data-slate in his hand for the hundredth time that hour, reading the figures from the planetary scan. He smiled again as his dark eyes graced the numbers next to the word “Adamantium”.

  Holy Throne, he was rich. The Adeptus Mechanicus would pay well for a hull full of precious, precious adamantium ore, but better yet, they’d pay a High Lord’s ransom for the coordinates of this rock. The trick would be to leave enough ore here for the Mechanicus’ exploratory vessels to confirm the intense value, but still have a cargo hold full of collateral when he approached them. Given the amount of the rare metal woven through the vast asteroid below, that wouldn’t be a problem, not at all.

  He glanced at the figures again, feeling a smile break out across his handsome face. The glance became a gaze, and the smile became a grin. This smirking leer was broken less than three seconds later, when proximity alarms began to ring across the Maiden’s untidy bridge.

  Servitors and human crew moved about the circular chamber, attending to their stations.

  “A report right about now would be just wonderful,” Kartan Syne said to no one in particular. In answer, one of the servitors slaved to the navigation console chattered out a babble of binary from its slack jaws.

  Syne sighed. He’d meant to get that servitor replaced.

  “Well, I’m none the wiser, but thanks for speaking up,” Syne said. “How about an answer from someone who isn’t broken?”

  Blood of the Emperor, this was bad. If another rogue trader had chanced upon this site, then Syne was entering the murky waters of profit-sharing, and that would end in tears for all concerned. Worse yet, it could be the Mechanicus itself. No finder’s fee, no hull full of rare ore, and no room to negotiate, either.

  Navigation Officer Tore finally looked up from his monochrome screen and the bright runic writing trailing across it. His uniform was about as official as Syne’s own, which meant both men would have looked at home in an underhive slum.

  “It’s an Astartes vessel,” Tore said.

  Syne laughed. “No, it’s not.”

  Tore’s face was pale, and his slow nod halted Syne’s laughter. “It is. Came out of nowhere, Kar. It’s an Astartes strike cruiser.”

  “How rare,” the trader captain smiled. “At least they’re not here for the mining, then. Bring us about and let’s have a look at this. We might never see one again.”

  Slowly, the view in the occulus changed from a gentle blur of stars to settle on the warship. Vast, dark and deadly. Jagged, long and lethal. Midnight blue, wreathed in bronze trimmings, blackened in places from centuries of battle damage. It was a barbed spear of violent intent: the fury of the Astartes in spaceborne form.

  “She’s a beauty,” Syne said with feeling. “I’m glad they’re on our side.”

  “Uh… She’s on an approach course.”

  Kartan Syne turned from the majestic view to frown at Tore. “She’s doing what now?”

  “She’s on an approach vector. It’s bearing down on us.”

  “No,” he said again, without laughing this time, “it’s not.”

  Tore was still staring at his data display screen. “Yes, it is.”

  “Someone give me its transponder code. And open a channel.”

  “I’ve got the identification code,” Tore said, his fingertips hitting keys as he looked into his screen. “It reads as the Covenant of Blood, no record of allegiance.”

  “No allegiance code. Is that normal?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Tore shrugged. “I’ve never seen one before.”

  “Maybe all Astartes vessels do this,” Syne mused. It made sense. The Astartes were famously independent of traditional Imperial hierarchy and operation.

  “Maybe.” Tore didn’t sound too sure.

  “How’s that channel coming along?” Syne asked.

  “Channel open,” murmured a servitor, its head attached to the communications console via several black cables.

  “Let’s get this sorted out, hm?” Syne lounged in his throne again, clicking the vox-caster live. “This is Captain Kartan Syne of the trading vessel Maiden of the Stars. I have claimed this asteroid and the profit potential therein. To my knowledge, I am in no violation of any boundary laws of the local region. I bid you greetings, Astartes vessel.”

  Silence answered this. A pregnant silence, that gave Syne the extremely uncomfortable feeling the channel was still live and the Astartes on board the other vessel were listening to his words and choosing not to reply.

  He tried again. “If I have erred and claimed a source of profit already marked by your noble forces, I am open to negotiation.”

  “Negotiation?”

  “Shut up, Tore.”

  Tore didn’t shut up. “Are you insane? If it’s theirs, let’s just go.”

  “Shut up, Tore. Do the Astartes even mine for their own materials?” Again, Tore shrugged.

  “We have precedent to stake the claim,” Syne pressed, feeling his confidence ebbing. “I’m just trying to keep our options open. Need I remind you that there’s also the matter of over a hundred servitors and several thousand crowns worth of heavy-duty mining equipment on the surface of the asteroid? Need I remind you that Eurydice is down there with the digging teams? We won’t get far without her, will we?”

  Tore paled and said nothing for a moment. Needless to say, he’d been adamant in his advice to keep Eurydice on board and curtail yet another of her “I’m bored, so I’m going” jaunts off the ship.

  “The cruiser’s still bearing
down on us,” Tore said.

  “Attack vector?” Syne leaned forward in his throne.

  “Maybe. I don’t know how these vessels attack. They have one hell of a forward weapons array, though.”

  Syne liked to think he was a genial soul. He enjoyed a laugh as much as the next man, but this was getting quite beyond the realm of light entertainment.

  “Throne of the God-Emperor,” Tore swore in a soft voice. “Its lances are primed. Its… everything is primed.”

  “This,” Syne said, “has crossed the border into ridiculous.” He clicked the vox live again, failing to keep a note of desperation out of his voice. “Astartes vessel Covenant of Blood. In the name of the God-Emperor, what are your intentions?”

  The reply was a whisper, edged with a smile. It hissed across the Maiden’s bridge, and Syne felt it on his skin—the chill of the first cold wind that always precedes a storm.

  “Weep as you suffer the same fate as your corpse god,” it whispered. “We have come for you.”

  The battle did not last long.

  Combat in the depths of deep space is a slow-moving ballet of technology, illuminated by the bright flickers of weapons fire and impact explosions. The Maiden of the Stars was a fine enough vessel for what it did; long-distance cargo hauling, deep-range scouting and prospecting and fighting off the grasping attentions of minor pirate princes. Its captain, Kartan Syne, had invested years of solid profit into the ship. Its void shields were well-maintained and crackling with multi-layered thickness. Its weapons batteries were formidable, comparable to an Imperial Navy cruiser of similar size.

  It lasted exactly fifty-one seconds, and several of those were gifts; the Covenant of Blood toyed with its prey before the killing strike.

  The Astartes strike cruiser drew closer, opening up with a barrage of lance fire. These cutting beams of precision energy slashed across space between the two vessels, and for several heartbeats, the void shields around the Maiden lit up in flaring brilliance. Where the lances stabbed against the shields, a riot of colours rippled around the trader ship, like oil spreading across the surface of water.

  The Maiden’s shields endured this beautiful punishment for a handful of seconds, before buckling under the warship’s assault. Resembling a popping bubble in almost all respects, the void shields collapsed with a crackle of energy, leaving the Maiden defenceless except for its reinforced hull armour.

  Kartan Syne had the wherewithal to get his bridge crew together by this point, and the Maiden returned fire. The barrage from the trader’s conventional weapons batteries was monumentally weaker than the lance strikes of the Astartes ship. The Covenant of Blood drifted ever closer, its own shields now displaying the rippling colours of attack pressure, except—much to the unsurprised dismay of Syne—the warship’s shields showed no strain at all. The approaching vessel ignored the minor assault. It was already firing its lances a second time.

  This time, with the shield bubble popped, the lances ate directly into the Maiden’s hull. Predatory incisions were made in the steel flesh of the prey vessel, and the lances tracked and turned, beams of cutting laser fire neatly slicing through the lesser vessel’s armour. The Maiden had barely responded, yet it was already listing, losing stability, and shaking apart from half a dozen detonations across its length. The Covenant had picked the paths of its lances with due care, targeting explosive sections of the ship: the engine core, the plasma batteries, the fuel chambers.

  The strike cruiser broke off, its engines roaring into the silence of space to put distance between itself and its crippled prey.

  On the Maiden’s bridge, as his ship rattled and shook with myriad explosions, Kartan Syne glared into the occulus screen as the graceful warship speared away. For a sickening moment, he recalled when he’d hunted grey lynxes on Falodar, and the time he had seen one of the great cats kill one of the equine beasts that served as its preferred prey. The lynx had struck in a blur of movement, ripping great wounds in the horse’s throat and belly, then retreated to watch the creature bleed out and die. He’d never forgotten that. At the time, he’d suspected the planet was tainted somehow, to breed such behaviour in the fauna.

  “You remember Falodar?” he asked Tore.

  There was no response. The bridge was a maelstrom of shouts and alarms, as the crew and servitors fought hopelessly to hold the ship together. The noise annoyed Syne. It wasn’t like their straggles could actually achieve anything now.

  Syne was still watching the occulus when the final lance strike came. He saw it reaching out towards him, a beam of migraine-bright white that hurt his eyes, seeming to stretch an impossible distance across the stars.

  It arrived in a flash of burning light that blessedly silenced the panic around him once and for all.

  Eurydice Mervallion saw the Maiden destroyed in orbit. She stood staring in horrified awe as it exploded under the lance strikes of another vessel, but even peering into space through her magnoculars, the enemy ship was too distant to identify with any clarity. Whatever it was, it outgunned the Maiden by a vast degree. That meant she was probably dead, too.

  As deaths were concerned, this was hardly how she’d imagined she would go out. Perhaps it was her mutational gift that led her to such assumptions, but she’d always assumed her end would come when Kartan Syne ordered her to find a way through some horrendously difficult warp storm, and the Maiden was another “lost with all hands within the Sea of Souls” footnote in some minor chronicle. She certainly never assumed she’d live to be interred in the undervaults of House Mervallion, but that suited her fine, anyway. House Mervallion, as Navigator Houses went, wasn’t worth much in her eyes.

  And truthfully, not in anyone’s eyes.

  Mervallion was one of the lesser-known families within the myriad cluster of minor Houses: small, lacking influence, providing relatively mediocre Navigators, and largely devoid of wealth—all of which added up to why the Navis Nobilite had seen her assigned to a semi-respectable (at best) junker like the Maiden of the Stars, under the command of a weasel like Kartan Syne.

  Still, despite the weakness of her bloodline and pedigree, she figured she deserved a better death than this.

  The camp, such as it was, was unfinished. A bulk lander sat in the heart of the base, surrounded by teams of servitors still unloading the mining vehicles and drill columns. In an ungainly, cheap and uncomfortable atmosphere suit topped by a glass sphere for a helmet, Eurydice watched the black sky, ignoring the servitors around her. They shambled around in their modified protective suits, machine parts spinning, tensing, locking and unlocking as they wheeled equipment into position and constructed what should have been a fully-functional mining operation.

  She couldn’t help feeling annoyed. What a stupid, pointless way to die. Even if the unknown enemy up there didn’t land, she was still marooned. Her lander wasn’t capable of warp flight, so her ability to find the Astronomican didn’t matter a damn, and she had no supplies for any serious travelling even if she did somehow have the capacity to leave this barren rock behind.

  What she did have was an indefinite air supply within the lander, about three weeks’ worth of food, and about one hundred servitors that were still getting ready to mine adamantium from a mineral-rich asteroid. The mindwiped slaves lacked the intelligence to realise their mother ship was now nothing more than debris in space.

  Not for the first time, she regretted taking the job with Syne. Not that she’d had any choice, of course.

  Three years earlier, she’d been dressed in the black toga traditionally worn by her family while on Terra, kneeling before the Celestarch of House Mervallion in his throne room.

  “Father,” she had said, head cast down.

  “Eurydice,” he replied, his voice flat and toneless as it bleated in a metallic drone through the bulky voxsponder unit replacing the lower half of his face. “The House calls upon you.”

  Those words sang through her body like a chill in her blood. Nothing would be the same again. At t
wenty-five standard years of age, duty had finally called her into service. Still, she couldn’t meet his face. Eurydice knew her father was lucky to have survived the destruction of his speeder six months before. The juvenat surgeries to repair his body had been both extensive and costly, but he was far from the man she remembered from her youth. House Mervallion, even as part of the Navis Nobilite, could hardly afford to flush a fortune into the regeneration treatments the Celestarch would need to restore himself to wholeness. She hated to see him so ruined.

  But it was his burden to bear. He had chosen to ignite the rivalry with House Jezzarae. He had signed the contract that brought about the death of Jezzarae’s heir. As far as she was concerned, Eurydice figured her father deserved his speeder being sabotaged. She had no time for the petty feuds and revenge debts that linked the Navigator Houses more completely than any bonds of blood.

  “Who has purchased the talents of our House, father?” It would be wrong to say she’d dreamed of this day. At least, not with any real excitement. Between House Mervallion’s station and the fact she was the eighth of her father’s daughters, laughably distant from even scenting an inheritance, she’d known as long as she could remember that she was destined for life on some mass-conveyance scow. No glory, no honour, no excitement. Just a pittance bleeding back to the family coffers.

  But she couldn’t help it. Now the moment had come, she dared to imagine what lay ahead. The thrill of hope prickled her skin, and she felt herself smiling. Perhaps she would be chosen to guide one of the Imperial war vessels through the Sea of Souls, part of the Imperium’s unending crusades. Perhaps even the Astartes…

  “The rogue trader,” her father said, “Kartan Syne.”

  The words meant nothing to her. Nothing, except to kill her hope like a candle guttered by sudden wind. No rogue trader dynasty of any worth would stoop to purchasing a daughter of House Mervallion.

  It had been a satisfactory three years, though. Of course, fending off Syne’s smirking advances had been no treat, but she’d seen a wealth of the segmentum in her tenure as the Maiden’s Navigator. She came to know the ship as well as she knew the crew. Awake or asleep, she would hear the old girl’s voice in the creaks of the hull and the grumbling engines. She was a placid thing, the Maiden, and her complaints were gentle. Eurydice had liked her.