by John French
‘There is only one way to find out,’ said Covenant.
‘I concur,’ said the holo-image of Vult. ‘There will be something here. I have consulted the Emperor’s tarot. Two of my priests have also made readings. They are all the same: the silver door stands above the crone, the high priest and the pilgrim – all inverted above the lightning tower. We are come to a threshold. We must step through.’
Covenant nodded, and looked at Glavius-4-Rho.
‘We will proceed with a light infiltration. I will lead it.’
Vult’s image flickered.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘The Sixth Hammer will stand by to reinforce if necessary. The Valour’s Flame can cover the outer sphere in case something is out there watching us.’
‘Agreed,’ said Covenant, and then looked around at Viola. ‘Mistress Viola, you have coordination control, and will remain on the Dionysia. Do you agree, Inquisitor Lord Vult?’
The image of Vult nodded.
‘Good,’ said Covenant, ‘we launch in an hour.’
Viola watched as Covenant walked from the bridge. The image of Vult hung in the cone of holo-light for a second, his eyes glittering points between mask and hood. Then she disconnected the signal link and the daemonhunter lord was gone.
‘Does anyone else not like the sound of this?’ said Cleander, drily. No one answered. ‘Good. Just me, then.’
Koleg’s boots mag-locked to the deck with a thump as he stepped from the gunship ramp. The stab-light mounted on his visor sliced into the enclosing dark, catching the edges of machinery. Cool, metal-scented air filled the space between his mouth and the crystal visor separating him from the cold void. He held his macro-stubber level in his right hand, a short-range auspex in the other.
Enna moved past him, her own shoulder-mounted stab-lights pushing further into the dark. Like him, she wore an enclosed rebreather. The beam glittered off the burnished steel of her carapace armour. Lions’ heads snarled from her greaves. Twin daggers sat at the base of her back, and she held an overcharged las-carbine. Glavius-4-Rho came last from the open mouth of the Valkyrie’s assault compartment. The tech-priest moved with slow purpose, like a reptile starved of heat.
‘First waypoint reached,’ said Koleg, glancing at the auspex readout. ‘Zero power readouts, zero movement. Atmosphere absent. Moving to first ingress point to complex.’
‘Confirmed,’ said Viola’s voice, sharp and echoing over the vox. ‘Your pict-feed and location beacon are holding steady.’
Koleg moved past Enna. The acolyte was tight to the side of a metal crate, the barrel of her carbine level and steady. His visor stab-light caught the wing and half-stripped fuselage of an Avenger strike fighter, its cabling hanging weightless from open panels like entrails floating in water. Bolts, tools and globules of oil hung in the space before him as he moved across the hangar bay floor. Motes of heavy dust winked in the light.
‘Does not look like anyone has been here for a long time,’ said Enna. ‘No one alive, at least.’
Koleg did not answer. Auspex scans had identified over a dozen incursion points on the asteroid base. The hangar bay that Koleg now moved through had been judged the best for a principle point of entry. It was set close to the main mass of the Archive structure and so was the most likely to give swift access to the target location.
Koleg’s beam of light hit the hangar bay wall and slid along the dull metal until it came to a blast door. Yellow and black hazard stripes covered its panels. Koleg found the door control panel and dropped next to it. Enna moved up to the other side of the door. Her movement was smooth and controlled, he noted, but there was an insistence to it, an edge of impatience in her actions. She was superbly trained, but used to working alone.
‘Second waypoint reached,’ he said into the vox, then clicked the direct channel. ‘Magos, please perform your function.’
‘A moment of patience,’ replied Glavius-4-Rho. Koleg looked around for the magos, who should have been a few paces behind him. The light of the tech-priest’s eye lenses gleamed from the darkness further along the hangar bay wall.
‘The access panel required to open the blast door to the rest of the asteroid facility is where I am standing,’ stated Koleg. He found many servants of the Machine God simple for him to understand. Glavius-4-Rho was not one of that number. ‘Where you are located is not where you need to be.’
‘Not if I just wish to open a door,’ replied the tech-priest, and Koleg saw a flash of blue sparks flare next to Glavius-4-Rho. ‘But if I wish to do something more…’ Koleg heard something buzz, and then a weight slammed through him, jerking his gun down and pushing him to his knees. The walls vibrated. Machine parts fell to the deck. ‘If I wish that, then I am exactly where I need to be.’
Glow strips lit. Blocks of machines began to hum. Plumes of grey-white fog jetted from the floor and ceiling. The atmosphere rune on Koleg’s auspex began to blink from blue to amber as it sniffed breathable air.
‘And by my hand there is light, and there is life…’ said Glavius-4-Rho.
‘What have you–’ began Enna.
‘After reviewing the auspex scans and projections for this facility I concluded that the only way for there to be no energy output or residual trace indicators was if it was shut down rather than having failed. In the case of spiritual disruption to a complex manifestation of machine divinity there are usually traces of energy – machines sipping the last of energy reserves, and reactor decay markers. If there are none, it is not because they have been disrupted or decayed, but because they have been silenced. I theorised that a revival could be triggered once I was in contact with the flow of spirits.’
‘Why did you not mention it before?’ asked Enna.
‘I wished to spare your unenlightened minds the burden of disappointment if my theorem proved false.’ Glavius-4-Rho moved past Koleg, his gait now free of its previous sluggishness. ‘Ah…’ he said, extending a brass digit. ‘The door opens, as you desired.’
Koleg looked back at the blast doors as they began to peel open.
The space beyond was still dark, lit by distant flashes of stuttering electrical light. Koleg paused and released his suit’s helmet. The air was cold. The scent of machine oil and spilled fuel edged into its blank taste. In the settling light the hangar bay was a jumble of machinery and debris. The hanging motes of grey dust began to swirl. Scorch marks dotted the decking. Of the dozen craft that Koleg could see, half were wrecks, their chewed remains held in place by their docking cradles. To his eye they looked like they had taken hits from medium-yield weaponry. There were no bodies, though.
‘This is Koleg,’ he said into the main vox-channel. ‘We have breathable air. Gravity in place. Light and systems are activating, but partial.’
‘Thank you for the confirmation,’ said Viola in his ear. ‘We saw the system activation. Looks like half the structure is waking up. Did you trip an alarm?’
‘No,’ replied Koleg, glancing at Glavius-4-Rho. ‘We found the activation rune.’
He crouched beside the edge of the open blast door. His eye caught the glint of a shell casing rocking on the deck where it had dropped when the gravity had cut back in.
‘Be advised that we are seeing signs of significant engagement.’
‘We are seeing it from your pict-feeds,’ asked Viola. ‘Is there any indication of how long ago the action occurred?’
‘Hard to say,’ cut in Enna. ‘Not recent, but it looks as though the whole place was shut down either during the fight, or not long after.’
‘Understood,’ said Viola. ‘Proceed to waypoint three and hold. The principles are inbound.’
‘Confirmed,’ said Koleg. ‘Proceeding now.’
He flicked a hand signal to Enna, which she returned, and they rose to move through the open blast doors.
The space beyond was still. Light fell from the han
gar behind them as their weapons and stab-light beams pushed into the gloom-filled passage beyond. More shell casings sat on the deck, gleaming in the stab-light, rocking with the energy of their fall. A glow globe pulsed in the distance, the rhythm a stuttering blink of yellow.
‘Hold firm,’ said Koleg. Enna dropped to one knee beside the door. Koleg moved forward, pistol ready.
Light flashed above. Koleg’s pistol snapped up. The light vanished. Koleg froze his beam holding steady on the space above them. The lights snapped back, flickered, then burned steady.
‘Tears of Terra…’ breathed Enna.
Bones hung from the passage roof. Skulls, long bones, ribs and vertebrae hung in jumbled strings, threaded together in slaughter pit necklaces. Koleg recognised the horned skulls of herd beasts, the talons of predators and human finger bones. Some were yellow with age, stripped of flesh and polished smooth. Dried skin and sinew clung to others, as though they had been hacked from a bleeding carcass and hung while still wet and dripping.
The walls of the passage were bare, the metal covered with a layer of thawing frost. The strings of bones vanished into the fog of returning atmosphere. Granules of dust billowed on the air currents. Koleg dropped to one knee. Enna took a position on the opposite side of the corridor.
‘We are at the third waypoint,’ said Koleg. With practiced care he holstered his pistol and unslung the grenade launcher from his back. He checked the load, and clicked the safety off.
‘Strike group on target in eighty seconds,’ said Viola. The sphere of holo-light in front of her flickered as the second gunship holding the rest of Covenant’s incursion team cut towards the asteroid base. The positions of the cruiser Sixth Hammer and the destroyer Valour’s Flame were marked by green clusters of runes. Thanks to Inquisitor Vult’s agreement that central control of the operation should lie with Viola, tactical signals and information from the two warships now formed the view that filled her eyes.
‘Valour’s Flame, close to three thousand,’ she said, and heard the echo of her voice crackle across the vox-feed an instant later. Images moved across the circle of pict-screens suspended around the command dais. These were the feeds from the assault boats, from the void suits of the principle team and from the team leaders of the twenty-five reserve assault teams. They were a mix of the Dionysia’s complement of household mercenaries and troops that Vult kept in his service. Most of those seemed to be former Tempestus Scions, and veterans from elite regiments. All of them had so far responded to commands with clipped efficiency.
Her eyes itched with the awareness enhancers she had dosed herself with. Her mind was fizzing with observed details, all of it just under her consciousness. There were other, easier ways of doing this. She could have delegated components of the mission planning and oversight. She could have let servitors or machines compose a summary view for her. She could have done all these and more, but she had chosen not to for a simple reason; she enjoyed the control.
She switched her gaze to the feeds from Covenant’s team. The view from Cleander’s suit showed Titus Yeshar’s face on the opposite side of the crew compartment in the gunship carrying Covenant. The Navigator was lolling in his harness, pacified by the drugs pumping into him from the collar around his neck. Titus had not wanted to go onto the base he had led them to. Covenant had insisted, though. That was one reason Cleander was in the strike force rather than with her on the Dionysia; the insane Navigator seemed to hear and heed her brother and herself, but not anyone else. So if the Navigator went, so did Cleander.
She watched the two gunships of Vult and Covenant’s principle team converge on the target hangar bay. A second later she saw the image feeds from their suits judder as the gunship settled into the station’s gravity field.
‘We are in,’ said Cleander’s voice. She saw his view rise as he released himself from his mag-harness.
‘Acknowledged,’ she replied, then switched vox-channels. ‘All forces, principle team is on target.’
‘Three spinners sit on a hill…’ Cleander jerked the chain, and the Navigator staggered and then began to shamble after him. Sounds muttered from Titus Yeshar’s lips. ‘The wanderer, walks and sings the songs that none can hear…’
‘Come on,’ said Cleander. Covenant was already moving away down the bone-hung corridor, Severita and Josef flanking him. Koleg and Enna were somewhere ahead, the magos behind, curt reports fizzing back over the vox. Cleander was wishing a number of things, chief amongst them that he had stayed on the Dionysia, another that he had left his sword behind. The harness did not fit well over the void suit, and it kept banging his left knee. More than anything else, though, he wished that the Navigator would be quiet.
‘The seer sits on her throne of shadows…’
‘What is he saying?’ asked a synthesised voice from behind Cleander. He glanced over his shoulder and into the chrome skull plate of Glavius-4-Rho.
‘He’s saying nothing that needs to be listened to,’ said Cleander, and turned away.
‘I say what is there to be seen,’ hissed the Navigator, his hands patting the injector collar ringing his neck. ‘You said you would set me free, but the chains clink just the same.’
Cleander grunted, and shifted his grip on his needler. He tried not to look at the bones hanging from the ceiling. It was not that he had not seen worse – in fact he had seen far worse – but the jumble of bones hanging like wind-chimes in still air made his skin itch.
‘Not here,’ said the Navigator. Cleander stopped, and looked at Titus. The Navigator looked back at him, face open and calm. ‘The high priest is not here… only the shadow… only the witch…’
‘What did you say?’
‘This is the ground of the dead,’ said Titus Yeshar, with a levelness that sent cold running down Cleander’s spine. The Navigator smiled, brought a chained hand up, and tapped the metal aperture bonded to his forehead. ‘I see,’ he said, inhaling slowly. ‘Where there was one, now there are three, smiling at me…’
The vox spat static.
‘This is Koleg. We have reached the objective location.’
Koleg and Enna had moved ahead of the rest of the cadre, ghosting down the silent corridors towards the section of the facility where Glavius-4-Rho had found the heat trace.
‘Cov… Kol…’ Viola’s voice chopped in and out across the vox. Cleander winced as static growled in his ear.
‘Of these waters I drink, drink and forget…’ The Navigator’s posture slumped again, his chin dipping, spit drooling from his bared teeth. The vials in the injector collar twitched as drugs were fed into his system.
‘What is it?’ asked Covenant’s voice.
‘The objective seems to be inside a sealable enclave,’ said Koleg. ‘Heavy blast doors and multi-layered security. The entrances have been breached, though. Significant signs of conflict. Whoever was here before us fought to get in, and those inside fought hard to keep them out.’
‘The water runs swift under the bow…’ sang Titus Yeshar, his head lolling down against the drug collar. Cleander tugged the chain and the Navigator shuffled closer. ‘A coin, a coin for your eyes…’
‘Hold position,’ said Covenant into the vox. ‘We are coming.’
‘A coin from your tongue…’
Covenant turned to Glavius-4-Rho and Cleander. ‘Stay here and watch the way out.’
‘Love to,’ muttered Cleander as he watched Covenant, Severita and Josef move down the passage. Beside him the chained Navigator folded to the floor and began talking to his hands. Glavius-4-Rho unfurled sensor discs from the tips of his mechadendrites. Above them, the bones stirred in the cold air.
Fifteen
Grey dust settled like slow-falling snow across the chamber as Josef entered. Flat walls reached up to a high, domed ceiling, and reinforcing pillars as thick as a Titan’s leg rose from the floor in three evenly spaced rows. The entrance was
a pair of wide blast doors that led to passages broad enough for a trio of battle tanks to drive down them abreast. It had been a long time since the chamber had held anything as mundane or comforting as cargo. Clusters of dim glow-globes dangled from iron chains. Spirals of caged shelves circled the support pillars. More strings of bones hung from the ceiling. Mounds of skulls stacked one on another dotted the floor between rows of shelves. Soft shapes hung in fluid-filled jars, some smaller than a fingertip, some the size of a bull grox, their bloated substance pressing against the glass.
Stone slabs sat on circular plinths, their flat faces cut with grooves that led to drainage holes around their edge. Josef noted the tarnished silver of shackles and chains hanging from cleats in the sides of the slabs. The smell of chemicals, dust and dried paper rose to his nose as he stepped further from the door. His boots left finger-deep prints in the settling layer of dust. Brass casings slid and clinked beneath his feet. A section of towering bookcase stood in soot-blackened ruin.
Enna and Koleg were further in, just at the edge of sight before they would have become lost in the maze of bookcases. Both of them were hunkered down, weapons ready.
Covenant had paused further in, his head and psycannon moving slowly over the stillness. Josef squinted. The chamber was quiet. He was about to take a step when he saw a cold glimmer in the distance – a wink of light deeper in the chamber.
‘Do you see that?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Covenant, sliding his sword free from the scabbard on his back and stepping forwards. Severita’s narrow blade was already in her hand, but Josef could detect the shift in focus as she slid closer to Covenant. Josef moved with them, eyes scanning the bookcases. Some of the books had been chained to the shelves, but the others must have been nudged out of their places after the gravity shut off, because they now lay in a confused jumble. One of the nearest volumes lay open, its foxed pages creased and folded. Spiderwebs of ink and symbols marched across the yellow parchment. Josef heard a whisper breathe across his shoulders, and flinched. The symbols of the parchment clung to his sight until he blinked.
