The Flight of the Eisenstein

by James Swallow

  The theory was sound, she could be sure of that. The gravity of the dense, iron-heavy White Moon was already enveloping the Eisenstein, dragging it down towards the satellite’s craggy surface. If she did not intervene, it would do exactly that, and like the dour Death Guard had said, the frigate would become a grave marker.

  Vought’s plan was built on the mathematics of orbits and the physics of gravitation, a school of learning that extended back to the very first steps of mankind into space, when thrust and fuel were precious commodities. In the Thirty-first Millennium, with brute force engines capable of throwing starships wherever they needed to go, it wasn’t often such knowledge was required, but today it might save their lives.

  Racel glanced over her shoulder and found both Baryk and the Death Guard battle-captain looking back at her. She expected judgmental, commanding stares from both men, but instead there was silent assurance in their eyes. They were trusting her to fulfill her promise. She gave them an answering nod and went back to her task.

  Klaxons warned of new salvos of incoming fire. She tuned them out of her thoughts, concentrating instead on the complex plots of trajectory and flight path before her. There was no margin for error. As Eisenstein fell towards the planetoid, the drives would shift and ease her through the White Moon’s gravitational envelope, using the energy of the satellite to throw the frigate about in a slingshot arc, boosting the vessel’s sub-light speed, projecting her away towards the jump point. The Terminus Est would never be able to catch them.

  The frigate’s shuddering grew as the craft entered the final vector of the slingshot course. ‘Prepare for course correction,’ Vought shouted over the rumbling. ‘Mark!’

  STREAKS OF FIRE jetted from the Eisenstein’s port flank as the autonomic trim controls slewed the ship away from the moon. The bow veered as if wrenched by an invisible hand, shifting the axis with brutal force. The extremes of tension between the lunar gravity and the artificial g-forces generated inside the vessel knotted and turned. Hull plates popped and warped as rivets as big as a man sheared off and broke. Conduits stressed beyond their tolerances ruptured and spewed toxic fumes. Forced past her limits, Eisenstein howled like a wounded animal under the punishment, but it turned, metre by agonizing metre, falling into the small corridor of orbital space that would propel the frigate away from Isstvan III.

  ‘TYPHON!’ SHOUTED THE shipmaster, throwing procedure aside by daring to address the first captain without the prefix of his rank. ‘We must evade! We cannot follow the frigate’s course, we’ll be drawn down on to the moon! Our mass is too great—’

  Furious, the Death Guard struck the naval officer with a sudden backhand, battering the man to the decking with his cheekbones shattered and blood streaming from cuts. ‘Evade, then!’ he spat, ‘but warp curse you, I want everything thrown at that bloody ship before we let him go!’

  The rest of the bridge crew scrambled to carry out his orders, leaving the mewling shipmaster to tend to himself. Typhon snatched up his manreaper and held it tightly, his anger hot and deadly. He cursed Garro as the Eisenstein slipped out of his grasp.

  THE TERMINUS EST bore down, the warship’s drives casting a halo of crackling red light, a shark snapping at a minnow. The craft groaned as the monstrous thrust of her drives tore the ship out of the White Moon’s gravity well, the blade-sharp prow crossing the path of the frigate. As it did so, every lance cannon on Typhon’s battle cruiser erupted as one in a screaming concert of power, tearing across the dark towards the fleeing vessel.

  ‘INCOMING FIRE!’ BARKED Sendek. ‘Brace for impact!’

  Garro heard the words and then suddenly he was airborne, the deck dropping away from him. The Death Guard spun and tumbled across the bridge, rebounding off stanchions and clipping the ceiling before the energy of the slamming impact dissipated and he collided with a control console.

  Nathaniel shook off a daze and dragged himself back to his feet. Small fires were burning here and there as servitors struggled to bring the bridge back to any semblance of order. He saw Carya sprawled over the command throne, with Vought at his side. The woman had a severe cut across her scalp, but she seemed to be unaware of the streaks of blood down her cheek. Dimly, he heard Iacton Qruze swear in Cthonian as he climbed off the deck.

  ‘Report,’ Garro commanded, the rough metallic smoke that hazed the air tasting acrid on his tongue.

  Sendek called out from the other side of the chamber. ‘Terminus Est has broken off pursuit, but that last salvo hit us hard. Several decks vented to space. Drive reactors are in flux, engines are verging on critical shutdown.’ He paused. ‘Slingshot maneuver was successful. On course for intercept with jump point.’

  Decius grunted as he pushed aside a fallen section of paneling and stepped over the lifeless body of a naval rating. ‘What good is that if we explode before we get there?’

  Garro ignored him and moved to Carya’s side. ‘Is he alive?’

  Vought nodded. ‘Just stunned, I think.’

  The shipmaster waved them off. ‘I can stand on my own. Get away.’

  Garro disregarded the man’s complaints and pulled him to his feet. ‘Decius, call the Apothecary to the bridge.’

  Carya shook his head. ‘No, not yet. We’re not finished here, not by a long shot.’ He staggered forward. ‘Racel, what’s the Navigator’s status?’

  Vought cringed as she listened to a vox headset. Even at a distance, Garro could hear yelling and shouting from the tinny speaker. ‘Severnaya’s still alive, but his adjutants are panicking. They’re climbing the walls down there. They are weeping about the warp. I can hear them screaming about darkness and storms.’

  ‘If he’s not dead, then he can still do his job,’ Carya said grimly, chewing down his pain. ‘That goes for all of us.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Garro. ‘Order the crew to make the preparations for warp translation. We will not have a second chance at this.’

  ‘We may not have the first chance,’ grumbled Decius beneath his breath.

  Garro turned on him and his face hardened. ‘Brother, I have reached my bounds with your doleful conduct! If you have nothing else to volunteer but that, I will have you go below and join the damage control parties.’

  ‘I call it as I see it,’ retorted Decius. ‘You said you wanted the truth from me, captain!’

  ‘I would have you keep your comments to yourself until we are away, Decius!’

  Nathaniel expected the younger Astartes to back down, but instead Decius stepped closer, moderating his tone so that it would not carry further. ‘I will not. This course you have set us upon is suicide, sir, as surely as if you had bared our throats to Typhon’s scythe.’ He stabbed a finger at Vought. ‘You heard the woman. The Navigator is barely sane with the terror of what you ask of him. I know you have not been deaf to the reports of the turbulence in the warp in recent days. A dozen ships were displaced just on the voyage to Isstvan—’

  ‘That is rumour and hearsay,’ Qruze snapped, coming closer.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Decius pressed. ‘They say the warp has turned black with tempests and the freakish things that lurk within them! And here we sit, on a ship held together by rust and hope, with intent to dive into that ocean of madness.’

  Garro hesitated. There was truth in Decius’s words. He was aware of the talk circulating about the fleet before the attack on the Choral City, that there had been isolated incidents of Navigators and astropaths going wild with panic when their minds stroked the immaterium. The sea of warp space was always a chaotic and dangerous realm through which to travel, but so the reports had hinted, it was rapidly becoming impassable.

  ‘We have already tested ourselves and this ship beyond all rational margins,’ hissed Decius. ‘If we touch the warp, it will be a step too far. We will not endure a blind voyage into the empyrean.’

  The skin on the back of Garro’s neck prickled. The innate danger sense that was second nature to an Astartes sounded in him and he turned towards the bridge’s main hat
ch. Standing in the doorway, wreathed in thin grey smoke, the woman Keeler was watching him. The battle-captain blinked, for one moment afraid that reason had fled from him and she was some kind of ephemeral vision, but then he realized that Decius saw her too.

  Keeler picked her way through the wreckage and came to stand directly in front of him. ‘Nathaniel Garro, I came because I know you need help. Will you accept it?’

  ‘You’re just a remembrancer,’ said Decius, but even his bluster was waning before her quiet, potent presence. ‘What help can you offer?’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ murmured Qruze.

  ‘The survival of this ship is measured in moments,’ she continued, ‘and if we remain in this place we will surely die. We must all take a leap of faith, Nathaniel. If we trust in the will of the Emperor, we will find salvation.’

  ‘What you ask of him is blind belief in phantoms,’ Decius argued. ‘You cannot know we will survive!’

  ‘I can,’ Keeler’s reply was quiet, but filled with such complete certainty that the Astartes were given pause by it.

  From the forward consoles, Vought called out. ‘Captain, the ship’s Geller Field will not stabilize. Perhaps we should abort the warp jump. If we enter the immaterium, it may fail completely and the ship will be unprotected.’

  ‘You have only one choice, Nathaniel,’ said Keeler softly.

  ‘There will be no abort, deck officer.’ Garro watched the shock unfold on Decius’s face as he spoke. ‘Take us in.’

  ELEVEN

  Chaos

  Visions

  The Resurrected

  THE EISENSTEIN FELL.

  The warp gate opened, a ragged-edged wound cut through the matrix of space, and it drew the damaged frigate inside. Unreal energies collided and annihilated one another. With a brilliant flicker of radiation, the ship left reality behind.

  It was impossible for a person possessed of an unaltered mind to comprehend the nature of warp space. The seething, churning ocean of raw non-matter was psychoactive. It was as much a product of the psyches of those that looked upon it, as it was a shifting, willful landscape of its own. On Ancient Earth there had once been a philosopher who warned that if a man were to look into an abyss, then he should know that the abyss would also look into the man. In no other place was this as true as it was in the immaterium. The warp was a mirror for the emotions of every living thing, a sea of turbulent thought echoes, the dark dregs of every hidden desire and broken id mixed together into a raw mass of disorder. If one could apply a single word to describe the nature of the warp, that word would be chaos.

  The Navigators and the astropaths knew the immaterium as well as any human could, but even they understood that their knowledge stood only in the shallows of this mad ocean. Description of the warp was not something they could easily relay to the limited minds of lesser beings. Some saw the realm as if it were made of taste and smell, some as a fractal back-cloth woven from mathematical theorems and lines of dense equations. Others conceived it as song, with turning symphonies to represent worlds, bold strings for thought patterns, great brass reveilles for suns, and woodwinds and timpani for the ships that crossed the aurascape. But its very existence defied comprehension. The warp was change. It was the absence of reason unleashed and teeming, sometimes mill-pond calm, sometimes towering in titanic, stormy rages. It was the Medusa, the mythic beast that could kill an unwary man who dared to look upon it unguarded.

  Into this the wounded starship Eisenstein had been thrown, the shimmering and unsteady bubble of her protective Geller Field writhing as the insanity tried to claw inside.

  THE BLAST BAFFLES slammed shut over the bridge viewports the instant the ship began its transition. Garro was grateful for it. The familiar lurching sensation in his chest that a warp jump forced upon him made the Death Guard grimace. There was something that disturbed him on the deepest, most primal level about the hellish light of warp space, and he was glad not to be bathed in it as the frigate translated.

  ‘We’re through,’ gasped Vought. ‘We’re away!’

  Qruze patted her on the shoulder as a rough-throated cheer sounded from the crewmen, all except the shipmaster, who gave Garro a grim-faced look. ‘We shouldn’t take our glories too soon, lads,’ he said, addressing his men, but facing the Death Guard. ‘As of now we have only traded one set of dangers for another.’

  The shaking, rolling gait of the Eisenstein showed no sign of easing. If anything, the smooth voyage through normal space was a distant memory, and the rattling swell it rode through had become the norm. ‘How long will it take us to reach safety?’ Garro asked.

  Carya sighed heavily, the fatigue he had been holding at bay brimming over to flood him. ‘It’s the warp, sir,’ he said, as if that would explain everything. ‘We could be in Terra’s shade in a day or we might find ourselves clear across the galaxy a hundred years hence. There are no maps for these territories. We simply hold on and let our Navigator guide us as best he can.’

  The ship rocked and a moaning shudder rippled the length of the bridge chamber. ‘This is a tough old boat,’ Carya added grimly. ‘It won’t go easily.’

  Garro caught sight of Decius, listening intently to his helmet vox. ‘Lord,’ he called, any signs of their earlier disagreement gone. ‘Message from Hakur below decks. He says there are… there are intruders on board.’

  Nathaniel’s hand went for the hilt of his sword. ‘How can that be? We detected no craft launched from Typhon’s ship!’

  ‘I don’t know, sir, I’m only relaying what the sergeant says.’

  Garro toggled the vox link on his armour’s collar and caught fragmentary barks of noise over the general channel. He heard the harsh snarls of bolter fire and screaming that clawed to inhuman heights. For an instant he thought of the Warsinger and her alien chorus.

  ‘Alarm triggers sounding on the lower tiers,’ reported Vought. ‘It’s Severnaya’s adjutants again, at the navis sanctorum.’

  ‘Hakur is there,’ added Decius.

  ‘Decius, with me. Sendek, you will remain here,’ said Garro. ‘Tell Hakur we’re coming to him, and send to all the men to be on alert.’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Sendek nodded his assent.

  Garro turned to the older Luna Wolf. ‘Captain Qruze, I would have you take my post here, if you will.’

  Iacton saluted briskly. ‘This is your ship, lad. I’ll do as you order me. My experience may be of some use to these youths.’

  Garro made to leave and found Keeler still there, standing before him. ‘You will be tested,’ she said, without preamble.

  He pushed past her. ‘Of that, I have never been in doubt.’

  ANDUS HAKUR HAD killed many times in his life. The countless adversaries that had fallen before his guns, his blades, his fists, they were a blur of swift and purposeful death. In service to the XIV Legion, the veteran had fought ork and eldar, jorgall and hykosi, he had fought beasts and he had fought men, but the enemies that he fought today were a kind that he had never seen the like of.

  The first warning came when Severnaya’s navis adjutant threw herself screaming from the door of the sanctum, weeping and shouting incoherently. The woman collapsed in a heap of thin limbs and knotted cloak. Her hands jerked and pointed to the corners of the corridor, as if she could see things up there that Hakur and the other Astartes were blind to. He stepped to her and felt his skin go cold, as if he had entered a refrigerated chamber. Then he saw it, just at the edges of his vision, the merest flicker of oddly coloured light, like fireflies shimmering in the dark. It came and went so fast for a moment he thought it might have been a trick of his brain, an after-effect of stress and battle fatigue.

  He was still processing this when the first of the things emerged out of the smoky air and killed the Death Guard standing with his back to him. Hakur had the impression of a spinning disc, a wide purple blade trailing stinging cilia from its edges, and then the Astartes was being ripped open, blood and gore issuing out in runnels. Hakur fired refl
exively, aware that his battle-brother was already beyond rescue, snapping off a three-round burst at the diaphanous shape. It died with a shriek, but the sound became a clarion call and suddenly new and different forms were emerging from the walls and floor. They brought a stench of such potency with them that Hakur’s gorge rose and he tasted acid bile. The adjutant was already on her knees and puking violently.

  ‘Blood’s oath!’ cursed one of the men in his squad. ‘Rot and death!’

  It was that, and a hundred times worse. The slices through which the creatures emerged allowed draughts of foetid plague-house stink to coil into the corridor. Patches of fungus and rusty discolouration fingered along crevices in the iron decking where the stench crawled forth, but this was only precursor to the diseased horrors of the invaders themselves.

  They sickened Hakur to such a degree that he attacked instantly, so abhorrent were these things that the thought of their continued existence revolted him. The shape of the creatures was vaguely that of a man, but only in the grossest, most basic sense. Ropey limbs that shook with palsy flicked and clawed with black, decayed talons. Distended, malformed hooves scraped across the decking, leaving lines of acid slime and excrement. Each one was naked, and bloated around the torso and belly with gaseous buboes and grotesque sores that wept thick pus. Heads were shrunken balls of flaking skin over rictus-grinning skulls. All of them had trains of buzzing insects following behind them, tiny bottle-green flies that dived in and out of the invaders’ open wounds.

  Where bolter rounds struck them, gobbets of flesh were torn off and rolled away in bloody hunks of stinking meat. They took a lot of killing, the skittering, burbling things coming at the Death Guard in hooting profusion. Hakur watched them take a second brother, and two more, even as he poured shot after shot into them.