The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Who are you?’ Desperation and panic bubbled in her voice. Behind him Hemellion heard running feet, and raised voices. ‘Why are you here? What is your name?’ He tried to pull his hand free but the brass fingers just squeezed tighter. She yanked him closer, so that his face was inches from hers. He could smell machine oil and human sweat and burning. ‘Please, what is your name?’ she pleaded, and her voice was no longer that of a woman or a machine, but a child. ‘Please tell me why I am here? Where is father? Is he coming back? Help me. Plea–’

  The light in Carmenta’s eyes cut out. Her body slumped back into the throne, her head lolling on her neck. The light from glow-globes and terminals dimmed across the bridge. The vast space was suddenly quiet, as though every breath was being held, every machine waiting for a delayed command. Hemellion stood staring, unable to move. Hands and metal pincers and bronze-cased tentacles pulled at him. His arm was pried out of Carmenta’s grasp. Voices were whispering angrily in his ear. He shook his head, still looking at the collapsed figure beneath the red robes. A moan trickled into the silence.

  The lights flickered back on. The air clicked and buzzed as thousands of machines woke to life again. Carmenta’s head rose slowly. Hemellion could see the smallest tremble in the movement.

  ‘Let him go,’ she croaked. Only then was Hemellion aware of the Cyrabor clustered around him, holding him. Their touch was warm, and their cinnamon stink made him want to gag. They hooted and clicked in reply. Carmenta shook her head. ‘No, it was not his doing. Besides he bears Sanakht’s bond, so I would not consider that course of action wise.’

  The Cyrabor glanced at each other, muttered in low machine noises, and let Hemellion go. He shivered, and pulled his robe closer about him. He had no idea what had just happened. He could not remember why he had thought to come here in the first place, but he was very sure that he did not want to be here now. He turned and began to hurry away.

  ‘Thank you, Hemellion,’ came Carmenta’s voice from behind him. But he did not turn back.

  Kadin stopped. Something itched inside his thoughts.

  Steam hissed in the air around him, venting from breaks in the pipes which formed passages along the walls and ceilings.

  He turned to look behind him, feeling the pistons in his leg twinge with pain. There was nothing there, just the clouds of white vapour and the smudged glow of the lights beneath the floor grilles. All that lay behind him was half a kilometre of passage. In front of him there was another kilometre before the arterial hub. No one else came down here. Even the Cyrabor rarely walked here, and when they did it was mostly the most machine-made of their kind who came clanking and clicking over the metal grates. It was about exposure to something, though Kadin had never tried to understand what.

  He knew these parts of the ship inside out. For years now he had walked them while the mockery of night fell on the Sycorax. The ship was a city without days, just the rhythms of the ship’s systems dimming lights and thickening air. Some amongst the slave crew clung to that slow rhythm, calling the down cycles night, the return of brightness dawn. Kadin had wondered why, when Silvanus had told him of this custom, but then he had realised that it was always ‘night’ when he chose to walk the lowest decks. Ever since then he had not been able to think of the gloom-tarnished hours as anything else. After a while he had given up trying.

  He turned and took another step. The feeling of unease came again, stronger, like a spider running on the inside of his skull. He kept moving. The grilles clanked under his steps.

  +Kadin.+ The word came from just behind him. He turned, shrugging the chainsword loose from his shoulders as its teeth began to turn.

  There was nothing there. Part of him just wanted to laugh. He let the teeth of the chainsword slow to quiet, and turned back towards the way he had been walking.

  Sanakht stood amidst the clouds of steam. He wore his high-crested helm, its faceplate polished silver and its eyes amber. His hands rested on the pommels of his sheathed swords.

  Kadin felt a twinge of pain in his head. He could taste burned meat. He grinned, showing his teeth in their black gums.

  ‘Get out of my head, witch,’ he growled.

  ‘You are resistant, aren’t you,’ said Sanakht. ‘Your soul is like an unhealed wound, still slippery with blood.’

  It was Kadin’s turn to shrug. He reached over his shoulder and relocked the chainsword to his back. Sanakht watched the movement in silence.

  ‘Why does Ahriman summon me now? We have not even gone into the warp.’

  ‘He has not summoned you,’ said Sanakht softly. Kadin went still, the feeling of unease still in his head, growing stronger now, pushing into his awareness. The pistons in his arms hissed, and his slab fingers twitched shut. Sanakht was speaking again, his voice still low, as though he was confiding, or confessing. ‘We were once alike, you and I, at least in one respect. The warp once wanted me too. It had its fingers in the dreams of my mind, and in the shape of my flesh. My eyes changed first. They became like stars, and where I looked I could see the truth of things, all laid out in front of me. It was beautiful for a time. I stopped thinking about why I could not take off my armour. I stopped wondering why I didn’t breathe.’

  Kadin felt his machine hands twitch again. The feeling in his head was a building pressure now. His eyes flicked to the pommels of Sanakht’s swords: the alabaster hawk head and jet jackal rested under the blue fingertips. He thought of the weapon on his back, the distance to Sanakht. He shook his head, and made as though to turn away.

  ‘We share nothing, cripple,’ he spat.

  Sanakht seemed to tense, and then shook his head, relaxing again.

  ‘No, no,’ he said, carefully turning and taking his hands from the pommels of his swords. ‘You are right. We are nothing alike and any similarities we might share, are skin deep.’ Kadin was sure the swordsman was smiling with the last words. ‘But even so I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Why?’ managed Kadin. The sensation in his skull made him feel as though it was about to explode.

  ‘We once called it honour.’

  Move! The thought exploded inside Kadin’s head. He twisted.

  Sanakht’s sword cut and activated in a single movement. Kadin had not even seen it leave the sheath. The edge scored across Kadin’s chest. Pain and fire spread from the wound. He smelt the ozone as the blade’s field met the air. The second sword was already in Sanakht’s left hand, slicing out from the scabbard, edge crawling with green flames. Kadin punched out. The force sword was burning a line across his vision. His fist slammed home. Sanakht hit the passage wall with a crack of shattering ceramite. Kadin stepped forwards, his hand pulling the chainsword free from his back in a snarl of spinning teeth. He cut down.

  Sanakht’s swords came up together, force and powerblades shrieking as their energies clashed. Kadin’s blow hit the crossed swords in an explosion of light and spinning metal. The chainsword’s motor kept churning teeth into the air. Kadin tried to pull back, but Sanakht was already moving, turning as he scissored the chainsword in two. Light flashed through the steam-thickened air. Half-molten chain teeth smacked into the flesh of Kadin’s face. He stumbled, half falling, blood streaming into his eyes, hand still gripping the squealing stump of his chainsword.

  The fall saved his life. A blade hissed above his head, trailing golden sparks. His shoulder crashed into the wall, and he rebounded with a shout rising from his throat, metal fist lashing out.

  He could feel something scrabbling at his mind, clawing to get in, mewling as it slid off the tatters of his psyche. The world slowed, the edges blurred, the uncoiling momentum of his body a paused instant.

  You are going to die here, said a voice at the back of his thoughts.

  His lead foot hit the decking. Sanakht was sliding back, both swords low, green eyes glittering in his silver helm.

  He is faster than you are, faster than you ever can be. For an instant he did not place the voice, then he recognised the low tones of Thi
dias: his lord, his Chapter Master, his comrade in exile. Thidias, long dead in the cold dark.

  You die here, brother.

  Kadin’s hand descended towards Sanakht’s face, metal fingers wide.

  ‘No,’ hissed Kadin. ‘Not yet.’

  Sanakht whipped his power sword up. The lightning-wrapped edge met the palm of Kadin’s hand. The power field buzzed as it kissed the metal. The fingers snapped shut. Light exploded through the corridor. Steam flashed to white sheets. Kadin’s hand and arm vanished, molecules tearing apart as the power field splintered. Sword fragments rang against his armour and he staggered, the stump of his arm drooling black blood and piston oil.

  Sanakht was spinning back, his shattered sword still held in his right hand.

  Pain, thought Kadin, the revelation as sudden and shocking as the sensation itself. I feel pain. And something within him, a memory, a last seed of what he had been, broke open. Rage hammered through him, clear and bright. It felt like cold water and ice. It felt like fire, like waking to the sun’s light.

  Sanakht spun back, his sword a spike of rainbow flame. Kadin stood tall, pistons hissing. Sanakht lunged. Kadin’s kick snapped out. Clawed toes hit the join between chest and torso plates and punched through. The sound of shattering ceramite cracked through the damp air like a bell breaking as it tolled.

  Sanakht fell, blood spraying in his wake, the fire of his sword guttering. Kadin watched him hit the wall, and tumble to the deck. Kadin smiled, feeling the sensation spread across his twisted face. The world was suddenly bright again, living. Part of him wondered why now, but he pushed the thought away.

  Sanakht was trying to rise, wet breath hissing from his speaker grille as he scrabbled at the wall. Blood was pumping from the crack in his armour. Kadin listened to the sound for a heartbeat, and watched as the swordsman pulled himself up a few centimetres.

  The stump of Kadin’s right arm was still bleeding, but more slowly now, as though machine and flesh were closing off the wound. He raised his foot and placed it on Sanakht’s chest just above the cracked torso plate. He pressed down, slowly, feeling his pistons moving in the place of muscle.

  ‘Do you wish me to talk to you before you die?’ said Kadin. ‘Or does honour not demand that now?’

  Edges of broken ceramite ground over each other as he pressed harder. Sanakht looked up. Kadin saw something move in the swordsman’s eye-lenses, a reflection of something behind him. He began to turn.

  The power blade activated the instant before it punched through the right side of Kadin’s chest. Inside his ribs he felt his lung and left heart explode. The blade sawed out of the front of his chest with a hiss of atomising flesh and bone. The world was suddenly slow again, slow and grey-edged and tasting of blood. He tried to bring his arm up, but it was just a stump now. Sanakht was rising, steadying himself on the wall with one bloody hand, force sword gripped in the other. Kadin tried to take a step, but his legs would not move. The power blade stabbed in from behind again, up and through the backplates on his right, and into his remaining heart. He turned his head, feeling the muscles in his neck losing strength even as he moved.

  Maroth tilted his blind hound helm as he pulled the power blade free.

  ‘Trusted…’ rasped Kadin. His lungs were bags of blood. The beat of his pulse in his ears went silent. He no longer had hearts to beat.

  ‘Exactly,’ hissed Maroth.

  Kadin felt Sanakht’s force sword punch through his chest.

  It felt like being cut by ice. He had time to think of his brothers, to think of Thidias, of Cadar, and Astraeos, all dead, all grinning at him out of faded memory. Their faces were skulls, and then they were laughing, and then the laughter was all there was.

  XIV

  CLAWS

  Hel’s Daughter was the first to kindle her engines. Behind her the Storm Wyrm and Crone Hammer followed, sliding into position behind the lead ship. Death’s Laughter and Blood Howl came with them, holding station between the larger vessels. All of the ships were scarred black, their colours lost beneath the touch of flames and storms. Damage marked their hulls: jagged gorges ran like smiles across their bellies and backs, rippled craters pocked their prows, and the mouths of their guns shimmered with heat scarring. There were other marks too, twists in the metal and stone of their hulls, as though their substance had run like molten wax and then hardened. Around them, howling storms of light rose against the star field. The faces of beasts seemed to shimmer there briefly. Drifts of vapour the size of continents reached to brush the five warships. This was the edge of the Eye of Terror, but even here the warp storms spilled into the real, lapping against the channel of calm which led to Cadia. Beyond that the Imperium waited.

  The Wolves’ ships had sat in the folds of the storm, the clouds of ethereal energy gusting against their shields, thrusters holding them steady beside their sisters. They had sat, waiting, as patient as the turning of seasons, watching for what they needed. It had come at last: a scattering of ships, tumbling towards the light of Cadia’s star. First there had been just one, its engines spluttering red, its hull bleeding gas and energy, rolling on its course like a drunkard. Then another had followed, its weapons firing at nothing, scattering fury and light in every direction. Then another, bloated and black, its hull weeping ectoplasm. Then ten, then ten more, then a hundred: all of them tumbling towards Cadia like a herd driven into a stampede. It was not a true fleet, it had no central command and little drove it towards Cadia besides the blind instinct of a starving predator drawn to light. The storms howled in its wake, and the Wolves waited. Only once the fleet had passed did Grimur give the order to follow.

  The ships accelerated forwards, firetrails lingering in the warp’s tainted void. On the bridge of the Hel’s Daughter Grimur listened to the burble of the servitors in the red-stained light. The ship was shaking, the scream of its spirit rising as the reactors poured fury into the engines. An Iron Priest in a plough-fronted helm glanced up at him. Grimur nodded. The ship began to sing in pain as its engines strained.

  Beyond the hull the five ships of Grimur’s pack were streaking towards a distant point of light. If the calculations of the Iron Priests, and the augurs of the runes had told true, they would reach Cadia just after the ragged fleet they followed. By that point they would have been accelerating for days, their reactors close to rupturing, engines on the edge of failing, and going fast enough that they would hit the Cadian Gate like an arrow shot from the nether world.

  Fire ringed the light of Cadia. Ribbons of explosions lit the void as mines and deadfall torpedoes detonated amongst the first wave of ships emerging from the Eye. Warp-twisted hulls became burning shards and scatters of melting slag.

  Within the outer ring of mines the Imperial fleet waited. Hundreds of Imperial cruisers, destroyers and frigates marshalled beside battleships like knights holding station beside their kings. All were commanded by men and women who had earned the right with blood and victory; and as the Eye-ward hemisphere of Cadia filled with fire, they waited.

  The rest of the incursion fleet came on, accelerating through the death fires of their kin. Cadia’s defence platforms began to fire, tracing nets of light across millions of kilometres. Chaos-wrought ships burned, exploded, twisted, died and screamed into the silence as they bled. And still they came on.

  The Cadian fleet began to move. Battle groups spread into position, squadrons folding out into webs of overlapping fire arcs. Eyes and minds across the fleet had seen the pattern of the threat and measured the response. This was not an attack, at least not one that was likely to succeed despite its size; it was an outpouring, the Eye vomiting out some of the damned held in its guts. It was violent yet predictable, a charge of unfocused fury. It would cost blood but the line would hold and cut the incursion down before it began.

  Clouds of bombers dropped from launch bays and began to spiral outwards from their carriers. Wave after wave of torpedoes struck the warp-touched ships in an unforgiving drumbeat of explosions. Hul
ls became kilometre long shards, fuming flames and metal as they spun. The Imperial bombers fell on the remains, melta rockets and seismic bombs reducing wreckage to crumbs and molten spray.

  Dozens of warp-touched ships died in the first rolling firestorm of the engagement, but not all. Some had changed in the Eye, the substance of their hulls bloating, becoming like a living thing, becoming like cancer grown from nightmare. These behemoths came on, heedless as parts of their hulls sheared away and burned, screaming with the voices of the dead. Across the system vox-relays blew out, and people woke from dreams with voices still wailing at the edge of hearing. Behind the sheet of flame formed by the ballet of destruction the warp storms coiled, reaching deeper into reality to caress the bloodshed.

  The Cadian fleet met the surviving invaders with sheets of intersecting fire. Battle groups already in place fired on the enemy vessels’ engines as their momentum drove them past. Fast frigates and gunboats cut closer, firing into already open wounds. The first of the great ships died under the guns of the battleship Imperatrix; already bleeding and wailing its pain into the warp, it exploded, the fire and gas of its death shimmering to blood and tatters of oily matter. But the rest of the corrupted vessels were not without teeth, and they did not die easily. Some fired back, roaring tainted plasma at their attackers, swallowing squadrons with sweeps of macro cannon fire. The invaders and defenders locked together, raking and cutting at each other even as they died. And all around them the blackness became an inferno.

  Grimur’s ships hit the sphere of Cadia as the battle reached its zenith. Their course had been calculated long before, washed through the half-machine brains of slaved lexmechanics until it was like a line cut by a razor through skin. The ships of the damned had struck the Cadian system in a wild rush, but they were still predictable. In the long weeks of waiting the Space Wolves had guessed how the defenders of Cadia would respond to such an attack. They might not know the precise shape of the forces defending Cadia, but how they would respond to a predictable enemy was itself predictable. The Wolves had picked a path that would slide past the defenders like a stone skimming over water. They had waited for the Eye to lash out at Cadia, lit their engines and begun to accelerate down their chosen path towards the cool darkness waiting on the other side of the system. Now, as defenders and invaders met, and burned together, the Wolves sliced through the edge of the battle sphere.