Watchers of the Throne: The Emperor’s Legion

by Chris Wraight

  I heard Slovo’s warning, then Erefan’s command to crash out, then the squeal and boom of the plasma conduits coming online, then mortal yells.

  I ran hard. My flamer twitched in my grip, ready to explode into life, and my blade glinted in the shadows. It took me a long time to get to them, and by the time I was close my comm-bead was crammed with the howls of the dying and the terrified.

  I burst into a narrow feeder corridor just below the aft enginarium tanks. A dozen of Erefan’s soldiers were scrambling back towards me, firing at something unseen in wayward bursts. Even if I could have shouted at them to fall back they wouldn’t have heard me – they were already breaking into that cold-sweat terror that fused their fingers to their triggers and locked their rational capacities closed.

  So I shoved my way through them, flicking the safety from my flamer. The corridor was choked with bodies, piled up like sacks of grain and sodden with blood. For a moment, I couldn’t see what had done the damage. Here was the one disadvantage of my soulless state – I had to use my physical senses to detect the daemon, and had no access to the psychic dread that would have given its presence away sooner.

  Run, I signed to my soldiers, hoping that they would see the signal and get out while they still could.

  Then I saw it. The combat lumens flooded the corridor in a blush of red, catching the slick skin of something that looked like a hunchbacked infant, no bigger than a human child. It was eyeless, and its domed head was three times the size of its spindly body. I had a brief glimpse of it capering towards me on finger-like legs, a huge mouth yawning open to reveal concentric rings of human teeth.

  I flooded the passage with flame, making the air shudder and blackening the bulkheads on either side of me. The creature leapt through them, its skin shrivelling and crisping from a greasy sack of bones underneath. Its howls were the howls of a human child in pain, and they set my teeth on edge.

  It bounded from the walls to the ceiling, evading my flamer before launching itself at me. I switched instantly to my blade, aiming to catch its wattle neck with a slice, but it was too fast, and clattered in close. We skidded across the deck, my blade pirouetting, and it went for my throat with its distended jaws. I smelt its faecal breath waft over me and nearly vomited. I dropped my flamer and punched the horror-thing away, sending its glistening sac of grey flesh slapping from the walls.

  It leapt back at me, jerkily fast, and clamped on to my leg. I felt the needle-pain of my armour breaking, then the hot wash of agony in my thigh. I whirled my blade and jabbed it down, stabbing the shedim clear. It was leaking black fluid by then, gasping, its little lung-bags quivering.

  I felt light-headed. Something in that bite had got to me, and the nausea was heady. It coiled and pounced again, relentless like a cornered arachnid. Somehow I managed to angle my blade and shove it into the creature’s path, ramming it point-first down its throat.

  It shivered, impaled on the length of steel, thrashing and clawing. Then it started to haul itself up towards the hilt, using its six prehensile fingers to drag itself closer.

  Grimly, I reached for my discarded flamer. One hand gripping my sword hilt, the other on the trigger, I pressed the muzzle into its blindly snapping jaws.

  Choke, now, I willed, opening the nozzles.

  The gush of flames flooded into the daemon’s mouth, spilling and bubbling and making its flabby stomach swell into a burning bag. For a moment it writhed on that spit, gurgling and clawing closer.

  Then its body burst, ripping open in a flail of dragged entrails. I shook it free of the blade, hurling its deflated husk into the deck, then stood over the remains and doused them with waves of flame.

  The pain in my leg was excruciating by then, but I did not relent. Even as my vision faltered I saw the shedim’s corpse shrivel and twist.

  As the last of its unnatural essence curled into ash, I finally ceased, sinking to one knee and leaning on the hilt of my blade. The flames blew out, and I was left alone in the bloody corridor, stacked high with tortured and broken flesh. I saw how many of my soldiers that thing had killed – I guessed about twenty – having gnawed its way through their chests and limbs in a hunger-frenzy. My own leg was aching too, swollen with pain far out of proportion to the size of the wound.

  I gave the comm-signal to Erefan that the daemon had been extinguished. I screwed my eyes closed, willing myself not to lose focus, and shakily got to my feet. I kicked through the residue of the shedim with my good leg, and saw that it had been annihilated.

  I had never seen one like that before. I added a given-name to the hundreds that already populated my internal bestiary – a ‘gnawer’ – although I was sure that in some forgotten library of the Inquisition there was a better title for such a disgusting excrescence of the warp.

  Dimly, I heard the drum of running boots. The standard drill would be enacted now – running repairs, an assessment of the damage, consultation with Slovo, and then it would begin all over again. We’d drag ourselves a little further along the winding guts of the warp, a little more battered, a little less able to defend ourselves against the inevitable assault.

  I started to limp back the way I’d come, knowing that I’d need to remove my armour and treat that wound soon. It was as I reached the end of the corridor that I saw the clean-up team arrive – six troopers, plus one of Slovo’s surviving menials.

  That was odd. There was no reason for the Navigator to send someone. I looked up at him, and he bowed.

  ‘My lord, Navigator Rehata wishes to speak to you at once,’ he said.

  I waved him away and made to push past, but – somewhat unbelievably – he held his ground.

  ‘We can’t go back in, you see,’ he said, nervously. ‘It’s the Astronomican. The beacon. It’s gone.’

  Slovo looked even worse than normal. I wondered if I was driving him to his death, and a part of me felt some guilt for that. It wouldn’t change anything, though, and I would have happily undertaken the same trials if our roles had been reversed. All that mattered was the objective, and we were all subordinate to that.

  ‘There’s just nothing,’ he said, miserably, dabbing a filthy cloth at his sallow face. His visible eyes were ringed with purple, and the plugs on the back of his hands were swollen with bruising. ‘It blinked. It flickered. Then it went out.’

  The tidings hurt me. I couldn’t detect the beacon, being even less receptive to its presence than a normal human was, but the prospect of what this might represent was like a physical blow.

  Erefan was in the chamber with me, plus his deputy on the command bridge, a man named Rythan. A newly promoted lieutenant called Oriath now served as my garrison commander, the last three having died fighting incursions. He looked incredibly young to me, hardly more than a boy straight out of our training facility on Arraissa, and I didn’t relish the prospect of him leading an action against these enemies.

  ‘You’ve piloted ships in storms before,’ said Erefan wearily. ‘Is this not the same?’

  Slovo laughed bitterly. ‘For a few moments, maybe.’ He looked at me accusingly. ‘I can still see the conduits. I can see how they move. But I can’t orientate it to anything. We could end up flying straight into the Eye, and I’d never know.’

  ‘You’d know that,’ muttered Rythan.

  ‘Then we make shorter jumps,’ said Erefan, also looking at me, this time for support.

  ‘Shorter jumps!’ Slovo’s laughter gained a manic edge. ‘Oh, then, shorter jumps.’ He leaned forwards across the table, his fingers shaking from lack of sleep. ‘They’re screaming for us out there,’ he growled. ‘You’ve no idea what I’m seeing. The universe is breaking apart. There’s a chasm now as far as I can see, and nothing leaking over from the other side.’ His eyes were darting now between us all. ‘This isn’t a storm. It’s something else. I’ve seen other ships, burning down in the deeps, broken open, mauled like carcasses. I
f we stay out here long enough, that’ll be us.’

  I looked at Erefan. How far?

  He shrugged. ‘Hard to tell. We’ve nothing to gauge by. Even the star charts seem awry, but we’re triangulating again.’ He saw that his answer was less than useless to me, and tried again. ‘I’d say that in normal circumstances we’d be a few weeks out, burning as hard as we could. But we’ve got a lot of damage now and a full medicae bay. I can hardly staff the bridge, let alone the rest of the ship.’

  I found it irritating how often my officers reminded me of the problems. They were tired, I knew that, but still it would have been nice if just one of them could have offered something more positive when I asked them.

  ‘We could Geller-seal the cargo and bilge levels,’ said Oriath then, hesitantly. ‘I spoke to the master of the enginarium and he said it could be done. It’ll flood them with radiation, so we’d lose them, but it’d be less to patrol at least.’

  I smiled. Youth brought some advantages – perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to write him off.

  Do it, I signed to Erefan. Then I returned to Slovo. The map.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘I wondered when you’d make me look at it again. Forget it. It’s like I told you, you can’t map the warp.’

  Perhaps you’re wondering why I tolerated him speaking to me like that. I didn’t like it. One crunch of my fist into his sweaty face would have reminded him of the proper courtesies, but of course I couldn’t afford to lose him. His natural aversion to me had been amplified by what I’d made him do, and he was close to losing his mind entirely.

  I’d had the map in my thoughts for a long time. Attempting to study it was probably pointless, but I nevertheless had sat in front of it for hours, trying to understand what it represented. Slovo’s words had reverberated in my head more than once.

  Suppose they knew what was going to happen. Suppose they knew which way the tides were pulling.

  They clearly had done. This was not a random development, it was something long-planned and brought to bear after the labour of millennia. That left the possibility that we might make use of their schematics. Perhaps Slovo could no longer see the Astro­nomican, but he could see the conduits as we travelled through them, and if they corresponded to the map in any way then he should be able to make use of it.

  He might have been exhausted, and he might have been half-mad, but he was a wily old soul and saw what I was thinking without me having to grapple with the concepts in sign language he understood.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he warned, wagging a finger as if I were a child in schola. ‘Oh, no. Too risky. Far too risky. We don’t know anything about it. Perhaps they let you find it. Considered that, eh? I wouldn’t spit on it.’

  But he would do more than that. He would study it, and he would use it. I would take it up to his chambers under armed guard and make him memorise its swirls and ganglia. The alternative was to sit here, rotting, while our supplies ran out and our engines choked for lack of fuel.

  When I turned to him, Erefan was studying me with a strange expression. He didn’t know about the map. None of them did, save Slovo.

  ‘What are we doing, then?’ he asked.

  I almost hesitated. For all my professed resolve, I understood the terrible risk here. Death was one thing – stranded in the void, gradually running out of air and light. The warp was another, a place in which death was the absolute best thing that could possibly happen.

  But there was really no choice, not if the balance of things was understood. I had to get to Terra, and if I damned myself and everyone else in the attempt, we’d still do it.

  We go back in, I signed, looking deliberately at Slovo the whole time. And we trust in Him.

  Six hours later, that’s what we did. I’d had to literally grip Slovo’s head by both temples to get him to look at that flayed-skin schema again, and it had made his nose bleed and his breathing rapid, but there was just enough residual loyalty left in that dried-out body to get him through it and plan something like a route.

  Before the shutters came down I took a final look out of the real-viewers. The void itself looked just as it ever did. You’d never have known there was anything wrong, and the stars burned across the arch of darkness, cold and clear. All that terror was cloistered on the other side, locked across the divide of emptiness, barred from psychics by laws older than the universe itself.

  I’d always had so much trouble understanding that. Perhaps non-blank humans could grasp it more readily, given their sensitivity to the psychic substrates, but for me it was beyond imagination. Hestia had told me once that our limitation was no different to colour-blindness, but that was a comforting fallacy. A person might live easily in a world where a certain hue was missing, but I lacked so much more. The very characteristic that made me able to slay the daemonic made me completely unable to understand it.

  Soon, though, the shutters came down and the vision disappeared. Once all was prepared, the klaxons sounded in anticipation of the leap. I made my way to the command bridge – I wanted to be close to Erefan in case this went wrong. As ever when we attempted a jump, all crew were armed and ready. What remained of our standing defence force had been distributed across the decks, waiting apprehensively.

  The chimes sounded, the chronos clicked over, the plasma drives coughed out and the warp drives engaged. For a second there was that gut-turning lurch – the snag of realities pulled out of synch – and then we were immersed, back into the realm of dreams.

  Erefan’s face was set hard with concentration. For a while, the cogitators whirred just as normal. Signal banks ticked over, and hard-plugged servitors gazed at scrolling rune lists. I felt the steady drumbeat of the Cadamara’s systems pushing us deeper in. The atmosphere became colder, just as it always did. Anything loose rattled. The mortal crew hunched over their stations, tense and distracted.

  ‘He’s finding a way,’ Erefan said eventually.

  I didn’t answer, but kept my attention focused on the ship’s vital signs. We were going fast by then, pushing all power into the warp coils, eking out what progress we could before the inevitable attack. Time passed – the first hour, then the next, then the next. I never relaxed. No one on the bridge relaxed. The structures around us creaked and flexed, stressed by the enormous forces thundering around them. I watched the regular status indicators from Slovo’s blister, one every ten minutes – nothing detected, nothing detected.

  It couldn’t last.

  ‘I have a signal,’ reported Rythan suddenly.

  I moved over to his station.

  ‘Warp-wake,’ he said. ‘Something’s locked on.’

  Speed? I signed.

  ‘Faster than us.’

  By then Erefan had patched into the feed. ‘Bigger, too.’

  For a ship to encounter another ship at random within the warp was so unlikely as to be a statistical impossibility. It wasn’t so much the size – real space was vast enough by itself for encounters to be rare – but the unique nature of the empyrean. You couldn’t ‘see’ another ship while warp-bound, only detect the interaction between the vessels’ Geller harmonics and the surrounding volume of extended ether. It didn’t even mean that the ships were in close proximity, physically speaking, only that they were occupying coextensive pockets of warp space, although given the reduction in viable routes brought about by Slovo’s ‘great rift’, it seemed unlikely that this one wasn’t right on our tail. Perhaps it had found us as a result of some coincidence of galactic proportions. Or perhaps whatever flew it had access to scrying methods and psychic expertise denied to us.

  They know what we’re doing, Slovo had said. They know where we’re going, and they’ll break us open to prevent it.

  Still, the matter was largely moot provided we both stayed in the warp. No interaction could take place between us, only a kind of shadow play that would last until one or both of us broke the bar
rier back into the real universe. No doubt Slovo could see it too, locked within his blister of visions, but I couldn’t ask him to clarify, not without breaking the concentration he needed to keep us from smashing into a chronovortex and hurling us out of space and time altogether.

  Maintain status, I signed, watching the ship’s signals carefully.

  ‘Holding steady,’ Rythan reported, his voice tight.

  Erefan shot off some orders to the enginarium and redistributed part of the standing reserve to the Cadamara’s void gun batteries, such as they were. That was standard operating procedure, but I found myself almost smiling at its optimism – anything powerful enough to be capable of tracking us through the ether like this was unlikely to be as lightly armed as we were.

  It wouldn’t go away. Every time I looked at the augur sweeps, the warp-wake was there, gaining on us, forging a faster and huger path through the maze. It had clearly locked on and was waiting for the chance to pounce.

  And then, just then, came the report it needed.

  ‘Geller integrity weakening,’ came the call from further down the bridge’s rows of sensor stations.

  I received notice from Slovo’s menials just a second later.

  ‘Daemonspoor detected,’ chirped the monotone readout. ‘Levels already high and climbing.’

  Erefan turned to me for guidance. I let him wait.

  Something boomed into the ship, knocking us in a slew to starboard. The overhead arches creaked, and a shower of fine dust drifted towards the deck.

  I looked at the augur sweep again and saw our shadow. It was, if anything, getting closer.

  Damn them, I thought. They’re in collusion.

  ‘Geller aegis drained across outer hull-wards,’ came another report, tinny and unwelcome. ‘Estimated time to failure – three minutes.’