by Paul Kearney
‘Mind your work,’ Dietrich said gruffly. But he closed his own eyes for an instant before speaking.
‘Marshal Veigh, this is a long-delayed pleasure.’
‘Indeed, general. I had thought it might be a pleasure indefinitely postponed. Our foes have been rather keen to prevent us from passing the time of day.’ Veigh sounded old, tired, but not yet beaten. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, and in the background was the never-ending din of artillery.
‘Are you aware of the assault we made this morning?’
‘Yes. We watched it from the citadel. It was very well done. My compliments to you and to the commander who led it.’
Dietrich turned to the young signaller. ‘Prokiev, you’re sure this is an encrypted frequency?’
‘Positive, general. It’s not been used before. It’s pure chance the citadel is running it.’
‘Good boy.’ Dietrich rubbed the filth-ingrained furrows of his forehead.
‘Marshal, our forward positions are now on the southern edge of the spaceport, about two kilometres west of the river. I intend to mass my remaining armour there and try to break through the enemy lines to the citadel itself. We will need your utmost support for this operation. Can I count on it?’
‘One moment, general…’ The line was muffled, as though Veigh were holding his hand over the receiver. Dietrich frowned.
‘Our ammunition levels for the heavier ordnance are at a critical level, general. We can support you with the lighter weaponry, but we must retain a reserve for our key batteries.’
Dietrich’s eyes widened. He clenched the receiver as though it were a snake he meant to strangle.
‘Marshal, with respect, if we do not receive support from your heavy batteries, then the operation will become extremely hazardous. I need your anti-air to keep the fighter-bombers from picking off my armour on the landing pads, and I need your heavy metal to break up the inevitable counterattack. Your lighter pieces do not have the necessary heft or range to do that.
‘You must understand, marshal. I have ammunition in plenty here in the Armaments District, and you have the big guns to use it. If I can break through to you, then your ammunition shortages will be a thing of the past.
‘But we must link up if we are to endure until relief arrives.’
There was a long silence, hissing static. Dietrich wondered if the comms link had been broken. He looked questioningly at signaller Prokiev but the boy shook his head.
‘Still connected, sir.’
At last the reply came back. Veigh’s voice was heavy with disgust. ‘General, I am afraid I cannot authorise the support of our heaviest calibre guns for your attack. We simply do not have the munitions to – to waste on an operation which is at best hazardous and at worst, futile.’
Futile?
‘Whose words are those, marshal? They are not your own, I’ll warrant.’
‘I am subject to the orders of the planetary governor, Lord Riedling.’
‘And he’s standing beside you now, isn’t he, marshal?’
‘General, this discussion is at an end.’ A pause. ‘Good luck.’
Then there was a squawk of static as the comms link was severed.
Dietrich sat looking at the silent receiver as though it had bitten him. He handed it back to the signaller, staring at the blank steel wall of the Baneblade’s compartment.
‘He’s given up on us,’ Dyson said, rubbing so hard at his stitched face that it began to bleed again.
‘It’s Riedling,’ Dietrich said. ‘He’s a coward, right through his marrow. He thinks he can hole up in the citadel until the Imperium sends a relief expedition, and be damned to everyone outside. But he’s wrong. The citadel will fall, and it will happen sooner than anyone thinks.’
Dietrich stood up, and strode into the outer compartment. There was more space here, though it was no less stifling. Even through the chemical-proofed ventilation system of the Baneblade, he could still smell the reek of death from outside. He had been a soldier all his life, but he had never yet known so much killing in so short a space of time.
Twelve days.
Perhaps it was all for nothing. There was no telling how long it would take Cypra Mundi to organise a relief force. It could be months.
He stared at the outer ramp as though things were written upon the blank steel.
Dyson joined him. Hesitantly, he said: ‘Sir, Commissar Von Arnim has left a message on the vox, requesting orders.’
Dietrich smiled. Ismail, he thought, you are one constant in a precarious world.
He straightened.
The hell with it. We were going to make the attack anyway. Might as well follow through with the plan.
‘Put me through to him,’ he said.
He punched out the combat blades on his gauntlet. They were still striped with black cultist blood.
I had forgotten what it was like, he thought.
I had forgotten how good it felt.
NINE
In Tenebris Hospites
The ship moved through space – a great multi-faceted jewel set with sails. It was an artefact of immense beauty, but something in its lines, the very curves of its hull, would strike the human observer as profoundly unsettling. It was beauty, but not as any human being knew it. Beauty which connected aesthetically, but which had at its core something entirely alien.
The great, strange vessel and its multi-hued solar sails cruised through the void like a ghost, invisible to most augurs.
The Adeptus Astartes had starships that were thousands of Terran years old, but this vessel had been created when mankind was still in its flint-wielding infancy.
The ship was older than the Emperor himself.
‘I love these spaces,’ Te Mirah said, looking out at the elongated forest which carpeted the Runground. For fully a kilometre, the park opened out, the shields drawn back so all the vegetation might have a glimpse of real, unadulterated sunlight from the star.
‘They are the gems of our race. Relics of memory.’
‘From a time when we had entire worlds under our feet. I understand these things, Jellabraiah. I seek only to share a momentary impulse, a second’s pleasure.’
‘I understand, my lady.’
‘You do not, and never will. I mean no insult, Jellabraiah. I merely state fact. I am old, and you are not.’
Jellabraiah bowed.
She ran her slender fingers along the thorns and antlers of her subordinate.
‘Leave me now, my fine and beloved. Go to your work, and blessings be upon you.’
‘Isha protect you, my lady.’
The Bonesinger glided away. Already, her voice had begun to hum and simmer, and in response the wraithbone vibrated like a lightly tapped drum. The beauty of the song was such that it seemed to clasp and entwine with the very living construct of the ship around her.
And yet it could not dispel the unease which had hovered over Te Mirah for long cycles now. As though some black bird were fluttering at the edges of her vision, never to be fully glimpsed, its wings beating in time with her heart.
The black bird, the fetch of Morai-Hag, the black crone of the eldar, who held fate itself in her withered hands.
‘Farseer.’
Te Mirah turned around, her cloak moving with her so that the sigils and stones upon it caught the far-off light of the stars.
She was one of the eldar, a race more ancient than mankind’s dreams. Two metres tall, but as slender as a young willow of Old Earth. Her limbs were long, elongated, and her skull was as fine and smooth as ancient ivory. Her blue-black hair was drawn back in a topknot, and her ears drew up to finely sculpted points.
Her eyes were as blue as the flicker of a far-off star, and she seemed hardly to be flesh and blood and bone at all. Like the starship in which she stood, she was a thing of strange, unsettling beauty.
That which had spoken her title was another cut from the same cloth. Sexless, but taller, and slightly more broad about the shoulders
. This one had hair as red as arterial blood, and eyes to match. A male of the species, it had a long, intricately crafted weapon strapped to its back, so ornate that it might well have been a mere affectation. But the blade, where it glittered out of the spine-scabbard, had a cruel, monomolecular edge that would slice through ceramite.
The eyes of this one were no less cruel than the blade, but it bowed as Te Mirah turned round, and there was a flicker of respect in them. More than that; there was something akin to love.
‘Ainoc, I sense you have something for me.’
‘News, farseer. It may be of interest, it may not. I would ask you to accompany me to Steerledge.’
He was hiding something, or attempting to. Behind Ainoc’s usual half-mocking manner there was a dreadful, burning eagerness which she had never seen in him before.
‘Lead on, Ainoc,’ the farseer said, intrigued and disturbed in equal measure.
She turned back once, to look upon the graceful needle-leaf trees, the black earth in which they thrived, and her own folk strolling under them as though they walked a world of their own, without fear. It brought back memories – not her own – but those of her forebears in the spirit stones.
There had been a time when the Void was a place without fear, an ocean to be travelled and explored. There were still memories of that impossibly distant era buried in the Infinity Circuit that beat at the heart of her craftworld, and the yearning of the souls in the stones communicated itself to all of her race, so that they were forever searching, forever dissatisfied with this rootless existence.
They were exiles, and had been for untold millennia, but they never reconciled themselves to the fact.
The two eldar travelled smoothly through the length of the great ship like ghosts, their minds reaching out and touching in welcome and salutation those they passed in the arcing, soaring swoops of passageways which connected up the compartments within. They felt the song of the Bonesingers in the hull, a comforting threnody.
Unlike the brutish vessels of lesser species, the Eldar cruiser speared through space with the smooth, silent efficiency of a living thing wholly in harmony with its environment. There was a low-level consciousness to the ship, and the very stuff of which it was made was in tune with the thoughts of its crew. It fed upon the affection and reverence of the Bonesingers, growing stronger as they communed with it.
Steerledge opened out before them, a curve of white wraithbone with void-shielded windows open to the bright dark of the stars. It soared up in ribs and vaults high above their heads, so that it seemed they were within the very anatomy of a vast, placid organism which protected and sustained them. And that was indeed the case.
The eldar crew were silent; there was no need for chatter here. They set their hands on the stones embedded in the protruding wraithbone and felt the course and speed of the ship, its needs and wants. And in turn they gave it commands with the simple slide of a hand across a gleaming stone.
Te Mirah felt the touch of their minds glide across hers as she entered. Steerledge was the place a human, one of the contemptible mon-keigh, might try to label the bridge of the ship. It was here that the nerve-endings and filaments of wraithbone were brought to a single distilled essence, where the vast length of the beautiful Brae-Kaithe could be controlled. Where the weapon-banks had their settings.
‘Anandaiah wishes to speak,’ Ainoc said. ‘She has sensed something which should be of concern to us.’
Te Mirah waited. A young eldar craftseer stepped forward. She was clad in the black, green-limned livery of the Il Kaithe Craftworld, as were they all, and she was barely of an age to be standing upon Steerledge. But Te Mirah sensed at once the latent power in Anandaiah’s mind. This one, she had felt before. There were the makings of a Bonesinger in her, or even something greater.
‘Of late I having been casting our scans out as far as I can, my lady, at first, merely to see how far I could remain attuned to the farseeking of Brae-Kaithe.’
‘That was… enterprising of you,’ Te Mirah said, her voice without inflection.
‘Forgive me. I overreached my station and my training. But I was able to chance upon something which had to be brought to your attention. I have brought it to the sand-table, if you–’
‘Show me,’ Te Mirah said. She felt the trouble in the girl’s emotional tone, and it was not merely that she had gone beyond her station to interlink with Brae-Kaithe’s farseeking scans. Something else there, darker. It was akin to the keen eagerness she had sensed in Ainoc.
They repaired to a wide flat platform of wraithbone, and here Anandaiah closed her eyes and began an intricate series of hand movements which left momentary glimmers in the air of Steerledge. Te Mirah looked at Ainoc, and the warlock tilted his head to one side and smiled.
I still know what best piques your interest, after all these centuries, my lady.
You sense how jaded I have become.
Perhaps. She is impressive, is she not?
She is beautiful also. Did that occur to you?
Most things which occur to you have also occurred to me. And Ainoc smiled, deep memories in his eyes.
Te Mirah did not smile in return. She did not much care for humour, or the flippancy which Ainoc occasionally continued to cultivate. He was a warlock of the Path of Khaine, and she had seen him slaughter thousands of foes with the Witchblade that hung always on his back.
And they had loved once, long ago, when such things still seemed to matter.
But she was the farseer of the Brae-Kaithe, wedded to her beloved ship, and she had watched almost a millennium of the universe come and go. She no longer appreciated his subtle jibes and rallies.
The craftseer was talented. Other eldar gravitated round the sand-table as the echoes of what Anandaiah was doing resonated throughout the chamber.
She was building a model of star-systems – she had not called them out of Brae-Kaithe’s memory stones, but was constructing it from her own memory and intuition. Te Mirah was impressed despite herself, and as the floating lights and novae grew in profusion, hovering above the sand-table like some fireworks display caught frozen in mid-burst, so she began to recognise them, to see familiar patterns in the jewelled glimmer of the stars the young eldar was summoning.
At last it was done.
‘Impressive,’ she said. ‘But to what end is this display?’
The young eldar grasped the shimmering penumbra in her hands and slewed it across the platform. She touched a star and it grew brighter, until it could be seen that there were tiny planets and moons orbiting it.
‘This is the star we know as Pe-Kara,’ she said. ‘The mon-keigh call it Kargad, and the system belongs in what they call their Imperium. But, my lady, I have been delving through the memories of the spirit stones, and the voices of those who have gone into the gems tell me that the Pe-Kara system once belonged to us, and within it is almost certainly one of those planets that we know as the Crone Worlds. It was once a place that the eldar called their own, and walked upon, under whose skies our people lived and loved and–’
‘Impossible,’ Te Mirah said, shaken. ‘The Crone Worlds were all closer to the Eye of Terror. They were overrun and destroyed by the Great Enemy, who holds them still.’
‘On what do you base your assumptions?’ Ainoc asked the craftseer, more gently. Drawing her out. He already knows, Te Mirah realised.
‘I have analysed the composition of the Pe-Kara star. It contains elements in profusion that are found more commonly in those systems close to the Eye of Terror. The star itself has also undergone massive gravitational anomalies in the distant past.
‘I believe that in the upheaval of the Eye of Terror’s creation, this system was pushed farther out across the sector, as though it were afloat upon a pond into which someone had thrown a great stone. We have seen this before, with other planets.’
‘Planets, yes – stars, no,’ Te Mirah said shortly. ‘And the damage done to those planets by the upheaval rendered them uninhabitab
le, stripped of their atmospheres.’
‘I believe that in the swirling currents of that time, the entire Pe-Kara system was lifted and moved wholesale, a whole section of the void rearranged.
‘It did not occur without extensive damage – there is a broad asteroid belt within the system, and large, moon-sized asteroids litter it. The oldest spirit stones tell us that Pe-Kara corresponds to a star we once knew as Vol-Meroi. It was orbited by seven worlds, and dozens of moons. At present, only one planet of any real size survives in the system. The mon-keigh call it Ras Hanem, but in our own tongue it was once, I believe, the world known as Vol-Aimoi.
‘I have farscanned the planet. The surface is a wasteland, but its basic structure and composition comply with our records of that lost world. The mantle and crust of the planet are laced with solid seams of ore and heavy metals. This may have helped it survive the upheaval of its relocation, which destroyed the other six ancient worlds of the system.
‘My lady, I believe it to be undeniable. Ras Hanem is Vol Aimoi.’
Te Mirah was stunned. The young eldar was staring up at her with painful intensity. She could feel the yearning in Anandaiah’s soul – it resonated with the same emotion in her own.
The need to find some remnant of what they had been, to rescue memories and artefacts of a vanished time from the Void before they were lost forever.
But it could not be, surely… They would have known before now.
‘Why have none of our fleets ever picked up on this before?’ she asked harshly.
‘The Kargad system is within the purview of the most dedicated warriors of the Imperium,’ said Ainoc. He folded his arms, and the lean cast of his features drew into disgust.
‘It is watched over by those among them known as the Adeptus Astartes. The Space Marines. Our people do not choose to have dealings with such fanatics, and such is their brute prowess in war that it has always been deemed too costly to make any deep foray into their territories in this part of the galaxy.’
‘Too costly…’ Te Mirah mused.
But this information changed things. If such a thing could be true, then it would be worth almost anything, any level of risk, to investigate it. A Crone World which had not been overrun by the forces of Chaos – there was no telling what might be buried in its soils. Priceless relics, soulstones, all manner of–
