by John French
‘All the sins of knowledge…’ he muttered as he passed a stack of wax tablets strewn on the marble floor. Thick clumps of dust swirled through the air as he moved.
‘Still no bodies,’ said Enna over the vox. ‘A lot of brass and bullet holes around here…’
Josef did not reply.
Enna and Koleg were ahead, leap-frogging each other’s position as they moved down the gulley between bookshelves, just on the edge of sight.
‘I see light,’ snapped Koleg’s voice. ‘Looks like flame, low level. There is noise too, mechanical, rhythmic.’
‘Advance to clear line of sight and hold firm,’ said Covenant. Josef glanced at his master, and thought he saw the muscles harden in his face.
‘In position,’ said Koleg.
‘In position,’ echoed Enna. ‘I can see the light.’
‘So what is it?’ asked Josef.
‘It is a candle,’ said Enna.
‘Enna, Koleg, your visual feed is intermittent.’ Viola watched bubbles of distortion pop across the images on two of the screens. The others showed grainy views of passages, ship spaces and chambers. Covenant’s team were progressing, and she was getting clean signals from most of them, but interference had begun to chop in and out of the pict and vox.
‘Mistress,’ called Void Mistress Ghast. ‘We are seeing anomalies across multiple sensor spectrums.’
She looked at the direct feeds from the sensor arrays. Amber runes spun across the ghost image of the asteroid base. Energy emission warnings spiked red, vanished and blinked to green. Heat emissions drifted in squalls of numerals. Her mind drank it in, looking for a pattern she failed to find.
‘Are our sensors functioning?’ she called.
‘Perfectly, mistress,’ replied Ghast.
‘Launch the reserves. All ships to full alert.’
‘Lord Vult,’ she said into the vox.
‘I hear you, mistress,’ said Vult. ‘I am observing the same sensor anomalies.’
‘We have lost the main vox connections to the facility. I am ordering the reserves in.’
‘Wait, mistress,’ said Vult. ‘Hold the reserves.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Because it is not the right moment. That is an order, Mistress Viola.’
The curse formed on Viola’s lips as the vox-link cut.
‘Hold the reinforcements.’ She shook her head and swore. Vult’s quick agreement to let Covenant lead the initial incursion suddenly did not seem surprising. It seemed damning. ‘And cover the Sixth Hammer with our sensors. I want to know where it is and what it is doing at all times.’
‘The lord inquisitor’s ship?’ asked Ghast.
‘Yes,’ snarled Viola. ‘The lord-bastard-inquisitor’s ship.’
Viola,+ Mylasa’s thought-voice snapped into Viola’s mind.
Viola flinched and caught herself.
‘Do not do that!’ she snapped. Ghast glanced at her. Viola shook her head at the void mistress, and forced her words to form only in thought. Mylasa was still aboard the Valour’s Flame, the lone member of Covenant’s entourage on the ship.
Do not do that, she thought. There is a developi–
I am hearing something,+ said Mylasa’s thought-voice. + It’s coming from the asteroid station. It’s in the warp. It’s–+
What is it? Viola put all her control into the thought, and was pleased to feel Mylasa’s telepathic words fade.
It is a song, Viola.+ Fear bled from the sending, controlled but undeniable. Viola felt the hairs rise on her skin. Distortion was popping and bubbling on the screens and readouts across the bridge. Static breathed from the vox-links.
Singing?
Wailing, singing, weeping. Viola, it is… it is the voices of the dead, and they are calling out to us…+
The ghosts hovered in front of Kade Zecker’s eyes, shimmering just beyond reach, pushing inbetween every blink.
The floor of the bridge was skin; wet beads of blood rolled across its surface, gleaming under the beam of her stab-light. She took a step and felt the floor sag softly under her tread. A gasp of breath puffed into the stale air. She raised the stab-light beam…
‘Commander…’ She blinked. Luco was looking at her. The bridge of the Valour’s Flame was as it had been. The memory image of the wreck’s bridge had collapsed just as the beam of light had reached for the source of the gasp. That was not here though – that was a memory… it was not here… it could not be here…
‘Commander?’
‘Yes.’
Blink.
The servitors sat in their cradles, the control machines clicking and humming just as they always did.
‘The auspex is returning high levels of distortion,’ said Luco. ‘The tech-priests are requesting permission to shut it down and consecrate the system.’
‘Yes… I mean… no, that will leave us blind to anything approaching. Our orders were…’
Blink.
Darkness surrounded her, cut by the rising beam of her stab-light. Her own breath fell in a mist of frost. The beam of light touched a…
‘…say that we are as good as blind as it is,’ said Ensign Luco. The ensign was frowning. His features looked older than they should, she thought: deep folds under the eyes and in the hollows of the cheeks. None of them had been getting much sleep since they had moved into the Iago system. That is, if you did not count the dreams.
‘Commander? Is something amiss?’
Blink.
The beam of the stab-light rose up a wall of smooth flesh, and touched a face. A face set in a living wall, its mouth open. She felt her finger freeze on the trigger of her shot pistol. It opened its eyes.
‘Commander!’
Ensign Luco was standing in front of her, his eyes fixed on the pistol she had drawn. She looked at the weapon. Why had she drawn it? The rest of the bridge murmured around her in the voices of machine systems and quiet orders. There was something wrong, something that did not fit, or that she felt did not fit…
‘No,’ she said, holstering the pistol. ‘No, there’s nothing wrong. Tell the tech-priests to get on with re-consecrating the auspex.’ She paused, her gaze dropping to the deck of the bridge. She swayed slightly. ‘I don’t like the idea of being blind out here.’
Enna stopped in mid stride, gaze caught by something on the floor nearby, winking in the dim light. The others were moving past her, their attention elsewhere.
She blinked. Her eyes felt wrong.
Slow…
Thoughts started but were not finding an end…
The gun in her hands was heavy.
After all this way, all this way, and… and… and…
What was…
Sweat was beading her skin inside the crystal dome of her suit.
She felt… like… she had…
A coin sat on the floor amidst the fallen books and settling dust. It was silver, bright as a beam of light pouring down into her eyes from above.
Where am I?
She blinked. She was not scared. There would be an answer to what she was doing here, but she could not remember it. The memory was there though; it was just out of reach. No need to panic.
The coin glinted amidst the dust on the floor. It was so clean, so bright. She could see the shape of a chalice pressed into its surface, but then she blinked and saw that it was not a chalice, but two faces looking at each other.
She wanted to bend down and pick up it up.
Where am I? How have I got here?
Covenant was saying something nearby…
Covenant…
Who was Covenant?
Enna…
Who was Enna?
The coin was shining like a fallen moon amidst the dust, like a reflection in water.
I have been here before.
&
nbsp; Her hand went out, and reached down for the coin.
‘Eight seconds to auspex system darkness,’ droned the voice of the servitor across the bridge of the Valour’s Flame. Kade Zecker listened and tried to stop visibly shivering. Her skin felt clammy, as though she were standing in sweltering heat. She loosened the collar of her uniform. The fabric of her shirt was soaking. She could feel Ensign Luco watching her, could almost see the worry in his eyes.
What was wrong with her? Ever since they had come here, she had felt… wrong…
‘Five seconds to auspex system darkness,’ droned the servitor.
Two tech-adepts were moving between the instrument stations, slowly swinging censers as they moved, black smoke drifting in their wake.
She really wanted to leave here, to break position and make best speed away from the asteroid station, and go…
‘Three seconds,’ said the servitor. The chief enginseer stood beside the primary auspex controls, his brass hand resting on a switch. Purity seals hung from the switch, binaric lettering crawling unintelligibly across the strips of parchment.
‘Two seconds.’
The enginseer bowed his head, servos clicking with tension along his arm.
Kade felt her eyelids twitch, as though trying to shut themselves against a blinding flash of light. She shivered, unable to stop it this time.
‘Auspex system function shut down.’
The enginseer pulled the switch.
‘Praise the machine, all is ordained and governed in its function,’ called the enginseer.
Blocks of machinery sparked and went silent. Screens went dark across the bridge. Parchment stopped pooling from auto scribes. A note in the concert of noise that hummed through the bridge vanished. The enginseer stepped back from the auspex control, head still bowed while he waited for the ordained time to pass before he could re-consecrate the system.
Kade looked around at Luco.
‘Are the gun-teams and boarding crews at full readiness?’ she asked, hearing the dryness in her throat as she spoke.
‘As you instructed, commander,’ said Luco. She glanced at him, hearing the hesitation in his voice.
‘Is there a problem?’ she asked.
‘No, ma’am,’ he said, hesitated again, and then carried on. ‘It’s just that with the auspex down we can’t see anything to shoot, and there was nothing there before, so I was just… You have just asked for the gun team and boarding crew readiness… just a second ago.’
She rubbed her forehead. The pain was bright and sharp.
‘I don’t like not being able to see…’
‘The sacred count has passed,’ called the enginseer, and then began a droning chant of binaric. Servitor assistants moved around him, pouring oil from steel vials onto the console top, and pinning fresh purity seals to its casing while their master’s hands moved over each switch and dial in turn.
Kade bit her lip, and felt another spasm of shivering pass through her.
‘The machine has been silent,’ called the enginseer, and then repeated the call in binaric. ‘The machine has been purified. The machine shall awaken.’
‘Auspex system active in eight seconds,’ called a servitor. Signals officers waited above the rows of servitors, staring blankly at dark sensor screens.
Kade felt her right arm shake. She looked at her hand. The fingers were opening and closing, gripping the air of their own accord.
‘Five seconds.’
She stared at her hand.
‘Three seconds.
The fingers were gripping the fabric of her uniform, pinching and moving as though the hand was trying to understand what it was touching.
‘Two seconds.’
As though it was not her hand at all.
‘Auspex system activating. The machine wakes. The machine sees.’
The enginseer pushed the lever. Screens flickered with static and then with scrolling code. Cables and consoles hummed.
Then the alarms began to sound.
The Navigator’s cry made Cleander turn. The chain holding Titus Yeshar yanked tight in his hands. The Navigator was scrabbling on all fours back towards the way they had come. Glavius-4-Rho pivoted his head to look at them.
‘No, no… It was not I!’ babbled Titus, yanking the chain. ‘I paid the coin! I am permitted to cross into the kingdom! They are here! Let me pass! Let me leave!’
Cleander pulled the chain, but the scrawny Navigator pulled back hard, and three links of chain jerked through Cleander’s grip.
‘Do you require help?’ said Glavius-4-Rho. Cleander was sure there was an edge of puzzlement in the words that carried even through the priest’s synthetically flattened voice. He ignored the question, and moved up next to the Navigator, winding the chain around his fist as he went so that the man could not move further away. Titus Yeshar turned and tried to punch him, fists flailing.
‘We cannot be here,’ moaned the Navigator. ‘We cannot. The three… the three… three spinners under the tree…’
Cleander noticed that blood was running from under the metal iris covering the Navigator’s third eye.
‘Titus,’ he said. The Navigator twisted, wrapping the chain around the neck of his suit. ‘Titus!’ The man went still, and looked up at Cleander with hollow sockets.
‘It is waking,’ said the Navigator, his voice low.
‘What is waking?’
‘The guardian of the door,’ said Titus. ‘We were not permitted to cross. We must flee. There are three, you see. The witch walks, and you do not see.’
‘I am struggling to divine a meaning in what he is saying,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. Cleander ignored him.
‘Covenant,’ he said into his vox-mic. The word hissed and echoed back at him from his ear piece.
‘We have crossed the threshold,’ said Titus.
‘Covenant! Viola!’ he shouted, holding the key to his vox-mic down. ‘Anyone! Any Throne-cursed corpse that can hear…’
‘We have crossed the threshold,’ whimpered Titus Yeshar.
‘I am registering total signal blackout,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. Focusing discs around the magos’ eyes whirred wide. ‘I am detecting multi-sensor band interference. That… cannot be correct…’
Cleander threw the end of the chain at Glavius-4-Rho, and ran in the direction Covenant had gone. Titus began to scramble away before Glavius-4-Rho caught the chain and hauled back on it.
‘What…?’ he began.
‘You wanted to help,’ shouted Cleander. ‘Try and keep him alive, and make sure that we can get back out.’
‘I do not… How do I perform those functions?’ called the magos. ‘How?’
‘Use your initiative,’ shouted Cleander and ran faster, coat whipping behind him, gun in hand. Up by the ceiling, the bones began to clink against each other.
‘We have lost communication with all units in the asteroid station!’ called Ghast. ‘And it looks like the Valour’s Flame has shut down all their sensor arrays.’
‘Show me a realspace view, multi-spectrum filter,’ snapped Viola at a signal servitor, ‘and get me links to the Valour’s Flame and Sixth Hammer.’
One of the large pict-screens above her flashed to an image of the void. For a second, Viola thought that she was seeing more sensor distortion. Flows of diffuse colour flickered across the vacuum between the Dionysia and the asteroid station. Lights flashed in the black: tiny pinpricks of pink, red and green. The whole image flexed, as though the volume of empty space it showed was fabric snapping in the wind.
‘We have a vox-link to the Sixth Hammer!’ called Ghast.
‘Connect us,’ shouted Viola.
‘Mistress von Castellan,’ Vult’s voice crackled through the air.
‘Lord, I believe that the contingency that we planned for is now in force.’
‘H
as there been a clear communication from Inquisitor Covenant?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But if we wait to receive one, then it may be too late.’
‘What is your reasoning?’
She fought an instinct to shout in frustration. She won.
‘I think the reasons are obvious, my lord,’ she said carefully.
The vox-link crackled and popped for a long moment.
‘I concur,’ said Vult. ‘The hammer falls.’
‘Connection lost!’ called Ghast.
‘The Sixth Hammer is breaking position and moving towards the asteroid station at maximum speed,’ called an officer.
Viola, the warp is moving,+ Mylasa’s voice was a shout in her skull, sudden and painful with its force.
Viola had just opened her mouth to swear, when a call came from one of the deck officers.
‘The astropath is screaming – we are sending in a team to restrain him.’
‘How?’ said Viola, speaking the word rather than holding it in her head. Data was flowing in torrents from the consoles around her. Sensors were failing, cutting back in, and dumping ghost readouts into tactical displays.
It is spiralling,+ sent Mylasa. +The dead song is so loud… It’s bleeding through the veil…+
‘What about the station, Mylasa?’ said Viola.
The warp is still – it’s the centre of the spiral… they…+ The note of fatigue and panic in the sending shivered through Viola, and for a second she shared a shadow of Mylasa’s struggle as she cast her mind into the warp. +They won’t feel it yet… They are at the eye of the storm.+
On the screen showing the external view, the void flickered. Threads of lightning flashed impossibly across the dark. The swirls of colour curdled and thickened, clumping into clouds.
Viola, I cannot keep this connection open. There is another problem. Commander Zecker–+
Mylasa’s voice vanished. Viola staggered as the telepathic link broke. Copper seasoned the spit in her mouth.
‘Signal the Valour’s Flame to hold position,’ called Viola. ‘I don’t care if you have to use flags or a lamp, but get them to hold.’
