Ahriman: Exile

by John French

‘Incorrect. Temporal distortion across this volume is falling, and we are within exposure levels. We approach, send a recovery mission, return and continue on to Cadia. In and out, as soldiers say.’ Erionas paused, as if enjoying his use of such a phrase. ‘We have risked much, why not a little more?’

  Malkira snorted. After a handful of heartbeats they both turned to look at Iobel.

  She knew it would come to this. ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘We will investigate with caution.’ Malkira scowled, but began hissing orders to servitors and crew. Iobel was sure Erionas was smiling behind his respirator.

  The Titan Child lay in the void, its hull gently revolving on an irregular axis. Grey clouds of gas and atomised liquid hung around its bulk, expanding slowly like warm breath expelled into cold night air.

  ‘This is ill-advised,’ said Astraeos, and glanced towards Carmenta. She ignored him. Connected by a trunk of cables to the ship, it was easy to let the activity in the hold fall into the background of her awareness. It was not a full interface, the systems here did not allow for that; her mind was still her own, but she could feel the rumbling dreams of the Titan Child, and touch its heart. It was reassuring, like knowing someone was close to you as you slept. The ship was half dormant, its injuries allowed to bleed energy and waste into the void. She felt the tug of its slumber, even as she controlled its steady beat.

  ‘The Imperial ship is on an intercept course,’ said Ahriman without looking up from where he knelt on the deck. ‘Our alternatives at this point are limited.’ He was armoured again. The azure lacquer reflected the stab lights suspended above. A white tabard covered his torso and hung around his legs. Parchments hung from his shoulder guards, covered in script Carmenta did not understand. A design spiralled out from where he knelt, its curves and sinuous symbols burned into the deck with a melta torch. It spanned the width of the hold, ranging across hundreds of metres of metal plating. It had taken days, and Ahriman had laboured alone until now. At the tip of his hand she saw the white heat of a flame spark and then vanish.

  ‘We may not survive the damage,’ said Astraeos. Like Carmenta, he stood on a hoist suspended a foot off the hold’s floor.

  ‘We certainly won’t survive another way,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos looked as if he were about to say something else, but remained silent. His armour was an echo of Ahriman’s, but Carmenta could not shake the feeling that it looked temporary, as if the blue painted over the pitted battle plate would flake off to reveal the old bronze beneath.

  They are both right, thought Carmenta. This plan will probably kill us all, but we have no choice. Wait until a ship came close enough to become curious. Cripple its engines with a surprise weapons strike. Then Ahriman, Kadin and Astraeos would board the stranded ship and take what they had come for. Then run again. It was simple, but it rested so much on chance and luck that Carmenta could feel herself recoiling from the risk, not least because of Ahriman’s method of boarding their prey.

  He will kill us, said a voice inside her. He has nearly done so many times over. He is our destruction. She suppressed her worries with a shiver. At least they had been lucky in one respect. They could have waited months or years for a ship to pass close enough to notice them and decide to have a closer look. In fact it had only taken a few weeks.

  ‘The Imperial ship is closing, and transmitting hailing codes.’ She could feel the cipher codes itching across the Titan Child’s systems. The signals felt aggressive, like a challenge shouted at a figure seen on the edge of light. They are right to be cautious, she thought.

  ‘Why do they hail us? We are a near dead wreck in their eyes, are we not?’ asked Astraeos.

  ‘They are seeing if there are any survivors or active response systems,’ she said.

  ‘If they find any signs that the ship is not as dead as it seems…’

  ‘They won’t.’ She had prepared for weeks, setting systems and machinery to function in broken spasmodic rhythms, and the largest part of the Titan Child’s wrecked appearance was no illusion. The encounter at the dead station meant that the Titan Child was in many ways what she seemed: a half-crippled ship, twisted by battle damage, barely clinging on to existence. Every time Carmenta had linked herself to her ship, she had felt its damage like a lingering fever, and emerged with empathic wounds in her flesh and damage to her augmetics. For the first time she had begun to fear the link with her ship; she had a terrible feeling that the Titan Child had begun to hunger for her, and its hunger was not kind.

  Astraeos grunted at her words and looked away, his eyes roaming across the design cut into the deck by Ahriman.

  ‘This will work?’ he asked, flatly. Ahriman looked up, his face impassive, but there was a flicker in his eyes as he looked at Astraeos.

  ‘Nothing is certain,’ he said. Astraeos met Ahriman’s gaze, held it for a second then looked down and nodded.

  ‘As reassuring as ever,’ said Kadin. He was staring at the pattern Ahriman had cut into the floor, his eyes flicking across symbols and lines as if taking in every detail, as if he were reading. Astraeos, she noticed, chose to stand at the other end of the platform from his brother. The two had not said a word to each other since they had entered the hold.

  They had not been able to remove the armour from Kadin’s remaining flesh, nor had they been able to recolour its blackened plates. Carmenta had personally fitted what augmetics were available. That at least had been successful, almost worryingly so. Kadin’s flesh had begun to grow and embrace the metal replacements. His right and left arms now ended in three-digit pincers of brushed steel. Below the waist he walked on a pair of back-jointed legs, which hissed at every step. A bolter and double-edged chainsword were mag-clamped to his back.

  Carmenta felt a tingle as another wash of signal from the approaching ship hit the Titan Child’s sensors. Her attention strayed from the sights in front of her, as a part of the still-waking ship began to break the signal ciphers apart. There was something about the hailing signals, something hidden in the weave of their code…

  The cipher cracked open.

  She blinked, suddenly terrified. She was trapped, crammed into a shell of soft meat joined to weak metals. She could not feel the void on her outer layer. She could not feel the beat pulse of her plasma core. She began to panic. She could not move. She did not understand what had happened to her. Her flesh shell was quivering. She did not understand why. She–

  Carmenta gasped and staggered on the hoist platform. A ripple of sparks spiralled up the bundle of cables that linked her with the Titan Child. For a second she could hear nothing but the panicked chatter of machines roaring to life in a disorganised spasm. Lights flickered on and off in the hold. The hull creaked. Somewhere in the ship, power began to flood sleeping systems.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Ahriman was on his feet. Carmenta blurted static-filled machine code, feeling the sharp sounds grate in her still-human throat. She was swaying, her mechadendrites grabbing blindly at the air. Ahriman vaulted onto the hoist platform. One of the metal tentacles snapped at him but he batted it away with a thought.

  ‘What–’ he began.

  ‘The ship,’ said Carmenta. ‘It is afraid, it’s trying to get ready to fight or run.’ The lights above them were strobing faster and faster, like a rising heartbeat. ‘The ship that is coming…’ She felt the world sway around her. ‘It’s not just an Imperial ship. It is the Inquisition.’

  ‘Multiple energy blooms,’ blurted a servitor wired into the sensor systems. ‘Full threat alert initiated.’ Iobel heard the words, and was already clamping her helm over her head. Red light filled the command nave of the Lord of Mankind. Blast doors were dropping over the exits. A static charge filled the air as a null field activated. Iobel felt a wave of nausea as the field smothered her psychic sense.

  ‘A trap,’ hissed Malkira from beside her. A cyber-cherub with wings of beaten copper lowered a dome-shaped helm over the crone’s head. It locked in place with a hiss of air.

  ‘We don’t know that yet,�
� said Erionas, his voice flat calm. ‘There are other possibilities.’

  ‘Target energy flow fluctuating,’ called a servitor. ‘Target shields sporadically active. Engines firing.’

  A silver-coated servo-skull drifted over Iobel’s shoulder. It held a boltgun in calliper hands. Iobel reached out and took the weapon, feeling the targeting display inside her helm come alive as she touched the gold-worked casing.

  ‘If it is not a trap, what other explanation could there be?’ she asked, glancing at Erionas.

  ‘Target vessel firing weapons,’ said the servitor.

  ‘Increasingly unlikely ones,’ said Erionas. His eyes opened, two bright spheres of glass gazing out at the red-lit chamber. ‘All weapons prepare to fire.’

  Ahriman felt the hull shake. Munitions impacts, he judged. He turned to Carmenta. She was twitching, trying to stand as sparks ran over her black robes.

  ‘How far out is the enemy ship?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ she gasped.

  ‘You must. How far?’

  ‘They have yet to reach optimal firing distance.’

  He nodded. It was as he guessed and it was not good. They were supposed to be closer, much, much closer.

  ‘Get control of this ship,’ he snarled, and turned to Astraeos. ‘Astraeos, Kadin, here.’ He was reaching into Astraeos’s mind even as he stepped to the deck.

  +Ascend,+ he sent, as his own consciousness climbed to perfect focus. He felt Astraeos’s thoughts resonate with his own. He began to loop his thoughts, sending separate patterns spinning through his mind like pinwheels, each gathering power. The design etched into the floor began to glow, fire-orange light radiating from where they stood at its centre. The power in his mind called to the etched symbols, and they answered him. He felt the swelling power roar with hunger that he alone could not feed.

  +Now,+ he sent to Astraeos, and raised his hands. His mind touched Astraeos’s consciousness and linked to it.

  It was like standing at the site of a lightning strike. Around them the Titan Child vanished, and Ahriman’s mind soared across space like a burning comet.

  ‘Accelerate. Maintain fire,’ called Erionas, his voice raised over the babble of machines and voices. ‘Burn it to nothing.’ Iobel watched the crew respond. Her throne and the deck beneath it were shaking in time with the recoil of hundreds of guns.

  ‘Target impacts are good,’ purred Erionas. Iobel could tell he was watching the direct gunnery dataflow. ‘We will need to be closer to finish her off, but annihilation will be complete.’

  ‘So sure?’ said Malkira, the speaker-grille of her helm robbing her voice of none of its scorn.

  ‘Yes,’ said Erionas. ‘We will have virtually destroyed them before they are in effective range.’ Iobel found herself nodding, but not because of the words. Her skin felt taut. A sour taste of metal ran over her tongue. There was something wrong, she could feel it. On her chest the chronotrap’s cogs began to whirl faster.

  They should have turned and left the wreck to its fate, they should have kept course for Cadia. They should…

  She stopped her thoughts. Her eyes were closed, her breath and pulse still. She let her perceptions settle, trying to see the pattern in the whirl of emotion and sensations. On the Lord of Mankind she alone was a psyker. Her ability was low grade, barely a functioning talent, but in that moment she knew that something was very, very wrong. It was like a building wave of pressure rolling in front of a storm.

  ‘Something is coming.’ Her voice was cold, and only she heard the tremble at its root.

  ‘What–’ began Erionas, but at that moment Iobel felt something slam into her mind with the force of a tidal wave. Around the bridge, machines, servitors and people were yelling. Every chronotrap across the ship began to hiss as their cogs spun to a blur.

  Astraeos could still see even with his eyes closed. He could see Ahriman stood to his right, his arms outstretched, his physical form lost in a white blaze of light. He could see Kadin, his face coldly impassive. Ahriman spoke another phrase, and the world became a shape with too many dimensions that spun away like a leaf caught on the wind. The deck beneath their feet was gone even though he could still feel it. Stars surrounded them. Astraeos did not need to look at Ahriman to see him; the sorcerer’s mind was burning like a sun, sucking in all other light, growing brighter and brighter. The stars were turning, whirling to broken rainbows against the void. Only the three of them remained fixed, only they were still, everything else was movement. They were skimming beneath the void, looking out at the stars like fish seeing clouds turn above the surface of the sea.

  A vast shape loomed suddenly in front of them. It was a ship, jagged, stardust-pitted, a black knife cutting through the void beyond the veil of swirling stars. Fire surrounded it, streaking from its crenellated flanks. They dived towards it. He felt something shatter around them, as if they had broken through a pane of glass. They were inside the ship. He could see shapes around him. They were translucent, glass-spun outlines of walls, doors, and pipework. Then reality snapped into place with a roar of sirens and the sound of tearing metal.

  XIV

  Taken

  Silvanus woke from his drug coma with a gasp. His mundane eyes opened to the flash of warning lights. The chair enclosing his body shook as his back arched, and his fingers raked at the black leather. He vomited, heaving mucus from his empty stomach. He could feel the awakening drugs grating through his body, flushing away his dreams in a chemical rush. His heart was hammering in a broken rhythm.

  He scrambled up, pulling needle-tipped tubes from his body. Liquid dribbled from the needle marks as he moved. He could not see properly, the emergency awakening still fogging his eyes, but that did not matter. All that mattered was reaching the observation cupola. They were in a full emergency: that was the only reason he would have been woken in such a brutal manner. It meant that there was an incursion within the ship, or a primary level threat. He needed to be able to steer a course should the ship have to translate to the warp.

  He tried to run. His legs skidded out from underneath him, and the cold deck came up to meet him hard. The air went out of his lungs. He gasped, lying on the floor.

  You’re a fool, Sil, he thought to himself. He came up onto his knees, and he felt the need to throw up again. A fool for thinking this was a good idea, and a fool for agreeing. After a moment of trying to stop the world spinning, he did vomit.

  In the corner of the chamber the hulking shape of his warden clanked forwards. Silvanus looked up at its machine gaze, and tried a grin.

  The warden stopped above him, looking down with a cluster of glowing red lenses. Its body was a vaguely humanoid sculpture of green-lacquered armour plates. Somewhere within its metal shell its lobotomised brain watched him. Its weapon-arms were hissing, fully charged and ready to fire. It was there to protect him, but it would also kill him if he ever showed a sign of corruption by the warp.

  Silvanus reached a hand up towards the warden. An articulated limb snapped out of its side, revealing a multi-faceted scanning lens. A sensor ray swept over Silvanus’s naked body; he felt its touch as a static tickle inside his skin. Its scan complete, the warden took a heavy step back, leaving Silvanus on the floor, hand still weakly raised.

  ‘Good to see you too,’ said Silvanus.

  He paused, took another breath, and finally managed to stand up. His head felt like an explosion had gone off in his skull. He swayed, glad that there were no mirrors in his chamber; something told him that his current state would not have had a positive effect on his appearance.

  He was tall, like all his bloodline, and unusually thickset, which only meant that he had slightly more flesh than a skeleton. Powder-white skin and scarlet eyes completed the overall aesthetic. Besides a few tubes hanging from needles still embedded in his flesh, the only thing he wore was a bandana of black silk and silver thread. The strip of fabric wound across his forehead, its ends hanging down between his shoulders. Beneath the thick silk, his thi
rd eye stared out blindly at the physical world.

  Muttering low curses at past decisions, Silvanus pulled a blue silk robe over his head. The fabric stuck to wet patches of drying blood and injection medium. A smell of flowers was thick in his nose, and he could taste strange metallic flavours on his tongue, another consequence of a shock awakening. They kept him in a drug coma when he was not navigating, or preparing to navigate. It was a safety measure, one among many designed to minimise the risk of sending a ship into the Eye. Silvanus had laughed when they had told him, but they had not seen the joke.

  He limped towards a door of black metal on the far side of the chamber. A golden eye sat in the heart of a rayed sun of orange topaz at the door’s centre. He raised his left hand as he approached the door. A luminous sun and eye emblem bloomed across his palm, and the door split down the middle.

  Beyond was a lift, its walls lined with black stone. Silvanus stepped in, and paused while the warden clanked through the door behind him. A second later the door sealed, and the lift shot upwards. As he heard the chains pull them towards the observatory high on the spine of the Lord of Mankind, Silvanus Yeshar, Navigator Primus of House Yeshar, wondered what had triggered the alert which had woken him. After a moment of consideration he decided he really did not want to know.

  Ahriman felt the shockwave as the Imperial ship’s psychic protection broke. Fragments of invisible barriers spun in the warp like shattered crystal. Across the ship null field generators burnt out, and silver wards melted to run down walls in white hot tears. His head was reeling, filled with images of racing stars. They had reached the objective, the translocation ritual had worked, but they would die now, in the space of a handful of heartbeats, if he failed in this moment.

  He closed his eyes, and let all thoughts fall away. His mind was clear. The pulse of blood through his body was an ocean surge, low and controlled. He could feel his muscles relax, and his armour mimicked them. Above it all he floated, a mind without thought, with infinite choice and unfixed possibility. He felt sensations run through his flesh, tugging at his attention, screaming to let them rule his mind and body. He held still. Half-formed thoughts passed through him like clouds across a blue sky. He let them pass.