Horusian Wars: Resurrection

by John French

  ‘Targeting system errors…’

  ‘Riots reported on decks thirty-six through forty…’

  ‘We have lost visual of the facility…’

  ‘Error…’

  ‘We have lost…’

  ‘Reports of…’

  ‘…screaming…’

  ‘…screaming…’

  ‘…screaming…’

  Josef froze as he stepped around the corner of the bookcase. Tall shelves encircled an open space of dust-covered marble. Openings between the shelves led off into the maze of cases that filled the chamber. Four more empty stone plinths sat on the floor at the cardinal compass points. Eighteen glass cabinets with brass frames sat in a ring within them. Horned skulls, black glass mirrors, carved pebbles and jars of liquid sat inside each case, untouched by the dust that was settling over the rest of the scene.

  A candle sat on a suspensor disc bobbing in mid-air. It was as thick as an arm, like those used to measure vigils in a cathedral. A book sat open on an iron lectern beside it. Inked diagrams, words and symbols spidered across the yellow pages. Josef paused with Covenant and looked around. Eight corridors of shelves led away from the open space around the lectern and book. The newly-returned atmosphere still had a chemical, sanitised taste, but underneath it a musk of dust and parchment and smoke was rising.

  Covenant and Severita held back. Enna had moved to the side but was looking towards the object at the centre of the circle, the object that drew all eyes to it, and had stopped Josef in mid stride.

  ‘What was generating the heat trace the magos picked up?’ asked Koleg, pointing the barrel of his pistol at the candle. ‘Not that, surely? I am getting nothing on the thermal spectrum.’

  No one answered. The flame was still burning high on the column of wax, noted Josef. It had not been lit more than a few hours ago.

  ‘We should go,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said a high clear voice from the echoing dark. Gun muzzles and heads came up. Josef did not move. He could not. The echoes of the one word exploded in his head. Ice poured through his muscles and blood. He knew that voice. Even from just one word, he knew that voice. ‘You should not have come here at all, Khoriv,’ said Inquisitor Idris, as she stepped from the shadows.

  Sixteen

  Idris’ footsteps clicked on the stone floor as she stepped forward. Josef stared at her. A banded body-glove covered her torso. Layers of red fur and black velvet hung from her shoulders and waist, spilling to the ground. She held an ivory and steel cane in her left hand, a jet sphere capping its top. Rings crowded her fingers. Her hair hung in a mane around her thin face. She gave a sad smile as she looked at them.

  ‘I mean it,’ she said, her gaze steady on Covenant. ‘You were not supposed to come here. Not now. You have been faster, and found more, than I anticipated. It forced me to improvise this situation. My mistake, but you were always quick, even if you sometimes reached the wrong conclusions. There are things we should talk about, though.’

  The silence and stillness stretched.

  Josef was still staring at Idris, searching her face. So familiar, but so wrong just by being there.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Koleg shift position minutely to look to where Enna had been.

  Enna… where was Enna? He could not see her.

  ‘You are not her,’ said Covenant to Idris.

  ‘Because I could be just as false as the simulacra of Talicto at the conclave, or because you would rather not believe it of me?’

  ‘Because Idris died.’

  ‘Then why are we talking?’ she said and took a step forwards. Her cane clacked on the stone floor. ‘Why are you not shooting?’

  Covenant did not move, but Severita shifted forwards, sword held ready.

  ‘Don’t interrupt, my dear,’ said Idris to Severita, cold smile still in place. ‘He wants to talk, even though he is not saying anything.’ She looked back at Covenant. ‘You want to know, don’t you? You have always cared about the truth, Covenant.’

  ‘Ero… why would…’ Josef heard the words and then realised that they had come from his mouth, forced up from the place where his confusion and shock boiled just under his control.

  ‘The trouble with the Inquisition, Khoriv, is that we have power, but we are blinded by vision. We have a habit of getting in the way of salvation. And that could not be allowed to happen, not here, not now. The game board needed to be cleared.’

  ‘The massacre failed though,’ said Josef. ‘Not everyone died.’

  ‘And what do those survivors do now, but quarrel and watch each other?’ said Idris. ‘You think that failure?’

  ‘We are here,’ growled Josef.

  ‘So you are, and the reason you are here is for answers.’ She looked at Covenant again. ‘And the reason I am giving them to you is because you have a choice to make.’

  ‘Unknown ship at the edge of sensor range!’ Viola heard the shout and turned towards the sensor officers. ‘Falchion class, sensor signatures match the hostile craft encountered at Ero. It’s the Truth Eternal.’

  ‘Its weapons are hot,’ called another officer. ‘It’s making for the asteroid. Fast.’

  So someone had been out there in the dust, thought Viola. For a second she wondered if had been waiting for them. Or if whoever had been on the asteroid facility had shut the station’s power down, and sent the ship out to hide. That made sense; if they had not been expected, whoever was on the station would not have had time to get off, but they had tried to turn the situation into a trap. It looked like it was going to work too.

  In the sphere of the holo-projection the asteroid was a flickering mass. The dagger shape of Vult’s light cruiser, the Sixth Hammer, was cutting towards it, flickering in and out of definition as the sensor readings struggled to hold true. On the far side of the asteroid, the Valour’s Flame was a flickering marker lying across the path of the incoming enemy ship. But the Valour’s Flame was neither moving nor firing.

  ‘Come on, commander,’ hissed Viola to the blurring image of the Valour’s Flame. ‘What are you doing?’ The snatch of panicked thought from Mylasa, before it had broken off, came back to her. There was a problem with Commander Zecker.

  ‘Get us to within gun and teleport range,’ she said, just as the holo-projection collapsed in a squall of static.

  Cleander skidded around the side of the bookcase and stopped. Another canyon of shelves opened in front of him. He was sweating inside his void suit. Breath was heaving from his lungs. It felt like he had been running for hours, even though it was only seconds since he had left the Navigator and Glavius-4-Rho. In that brief time, he had taken three turns down different corridors between the shelves. All of them should have taken him closer to where Covenant and the rest had gone, but he had not found them. He could hear distant voices that seemed close, but they moved, and something told him that if he were to follow them he would get no closer. It felt wrong. No, it was wrong.

  ‘Stupid, stupid idea,’ he muttered to himself, unsure even as he spoke if he meant his own choice to run after Covenant, or the whole mission to the asteroid station. Both were good candidates for things that should have been abandoned well before they started.

  He pulled a grenade from the harness on his thigh.

  He was here now, though, and he was not going to let this unravel. He was not going to die here, and he was not going to let the idiotic collection of rogues that served Covenant die here with him.

  He fumbled with the grenade, swearing silently at the heavy fingers of the void suit’s gauntlets. He tucked his needle pistol under his arm, took the grenade in both hands and clicked the arming stud.

  It had been the tone of Titus Yeshar’s voice that had flipped a switch inside him and sent him running into the stacks of half-burned books; the Navigator had been babbling portentous nonsense ever since they had taken him off
his familial void-manse at Bakka. He had been reluctant to bring them to the asteroid station, had resisted coming on board. But that was to be expected. Talicto had been a monster, and Titus Yeshar knew that better than most. You didn’t go willingly into the lair of a monster, even a dead one, unless you had no choice. Cleander understood that point from experience. But there had been something else in the Navigator’s sing-song mutterings.

  Terror.

  Pure primal terror.

  Cleander looked at the bookcase that lay across the direction in which he was certain Covenant must be. It was a cliff of charred wood and iron. He hefted the grenade.

  The light of the lamps hanging from the ceiling and shelves vanished. A diffuse twilight slid over his sight. The still-falling dust and ash was pale snow. Distances stretched to shadows. Far off, silent lightning flashed above the walls of the shelves.

  The sound of scratching and creaking wood came from behind him. Cleander froze, the grenade a dead weight in his hand, aware that his pistol was still under his arm. His skin prickled. The air suddenly felt hot on his bare face, as though he had just opened the door of a furnace. The dust and ash were the only things moving in his sight. The creaking scratch came again, closer, soft and subtle. He let out his breath slowly. The falling flecks of ash stirred in front of his face.

  Stupid, he thought. Really very, very stupid.

  He spun, catching the needle pistol as it fell from under his arm and bringing the barrel up.

  Servitors wired into the scanning consoles were babbling across the bridge of the Valour’s Flame. Bridge officers were shouting.

  ‘Unknown ship!’

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘It has weapons active and locked on.’

  ‘Frigate, Falchion class!’

  ‘It’s closing!’

  Kade Zecker was breathing hard, pain bright in her skull, her skin cold and crawling with panic.

  ‘What are your orders, commander?’ That was Luco’s voice. She recognised it, but it was coming from far away, and her fingers, her skin, her body did not feel like her own.

  She tried to speak, but pain ripped through her skull, and memories were pouring into her, images of horror and despair, burning away the present as they burst into being.

  Commander, listen to me, you need to liste–+

  But the ghost ship was tumbling out of the void towards her, its hull chewed and bleeding, and she could see the horror at its heart, and hear the voices calling in the still air.

  ‘Please help. If you can hear… Oh. God-Emperor, help…’

  ‘Commander?’ The shout filled her ears, and the world stopped. ‘Hostile ship is closing. What are your orders?’

  Blink.

  She sat on a white chair in a bare, black room. Its walls were square and flat, and without any sign of a hatch door or window. She looked behind her.

  ‘I am sorry,’ said a voice. Kade’s head snapped back around. A woman sat opposite her. Red hair fell in a long cascade over her right shoulder. Her eyes were dark, her mouth set in a thin line. She looked young, but also not. The folds of her green, silk dress rustled as she shifted in her seat. ‘You did not leave me with many options.’

  ‘Where am I?’ asked Kade.

  ‘Physically you are still just where you were, on the bridge of the Valour’s Flame, with your pistol in your hand, about to shoot your ensign in the face.’

  ‘I am–’ began Zecker.

  ‘Mentally, well… let’s just say you are in a small space of quiet, which I have hollowed out in your thoughts.’

  ‘I don’t–’

  ‘Spiritually? Well… that is a question that I am not qualified to judge.’

  ‘I was… just there…’ Kade shivered, feeling for a second two memories twirling together in her mind: the bridge of the wreck and the bridge of the Valour’s Flame.

  ‘Though from experience I would say that you are in a position of peril,’ said the red-headed woman.

  ‘You are the psyker, the thing that the inquisitor brought and left on my ship to watch us.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘That’s me. Though I look slightly different out of the flesh.’

  ‘What is happening?’

  ‘You are about to manifest a dormant psychic power,’ said Mylasa. ‘And unless I can help, you are going to destroy us all.’

  ‘I should not have killed the saint, Covenant,’ said Idris. ‘Our master was right. Mankind needs a saviour. It will not save itself. The Imperium’s strength is just a lie it tells itself. Argento was right to try to create that saviour, and we were wrong to stop him. The only thing he was truly guilty of was being too narrow in his vision.’

  ‘And for that you have killed our peers, taken up the weapons of the enemy, and damned yourself.’

  ‘What do we exist for, old friend? What do inquisitors really exist for? All of those thousands like us, stretching back to the creation of our order – what was their purpose? The purpose of the Inquisition is to save humanity. Not to protect the Imperium. Not to be limited by nobility, or what is considered possible. If mankind survives, we have succeeded. Anything else is a bargain made with extinction.’

  ‘You are not saving anything. If you are truly Idris, then you are destroying all the good you have done.’

  Is it her? thought Josef, still unable to look away.

  ‘You don’t believe that,’ said Idris to Covenant. ‘I know you. You didn’t believe it before, and you don’t believe it now.’

  ‘I believe that the Emperor will rise again, but what do you believe? Horusian… Talicto called you that before he died.’

  ‘The warp is always there, Covenant. We fight it, but we fight ourselves. Its strength is our strength. It cannot be defeated, but it can be mastered. It must be mastered.’

  It can’t be her, thought Josef, and in his mind he saw Idris as she had been in those earlier times. So clever, so sharp, so focused…

  ‘Impossible, foolish, vile,’ said Covenant.

  ‘Argento didn’t think so… and neither did you. What is the Emperor’s power, but the warp given shape and purpose? The miracles of saints and the dreams of a divine saviour, they are just a strand of the warp’s potential. All saints are witches, Covenant. All angels are daemons.’

  It could be her, thought Josef. His eyes could find no sign that the face was false, and the words… not what they meant, but how they fell from her lips, their force… It could be…

  ‘And you want me to agree with you?’

  ‘I am giving you the choice. When I said that I was not expecting you to be at the conclave on Ero, I was not lying. I had to improvise to keep you alive. I did not want you to come here, but I do want you to agree with me. We made the wrong choice before. You know that. That failure made you a penitent looking for absolution, but it made me–’

  ‘An abomination,’ said Covenant.

  ‘It made me see what I needed to sacrifice, if I was to be what an inquisitor should be.’

  Covenant tilted his head, gaze fixed.

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘This is not theory. It’s not blind faith in the future. We are going to do what is needed, even if no one else will. This is our time, Covenant. All the auguries and disasters, all the blood and horror in this place. It is what we have been waiting for. The salvation we all fight for will be born in these bloody stars. We will make certain of it.’

  A cold smile twitched on Covenant’s lips.

  ‘And you say that I am the one who became a fanatic.’

  Idris gave a small shake of her head.

  ‘You need to choose. You need to choose, now, on which side you want to be. I saved you from Ero because I hoped there would be a right time to bring you in, but you have come here before I was ready, and so some rather unpleasant things are going to happen. You have to
trust me if you want to live, Covenant, and you have to trust me now.’

  ‘Was it you that killed Talicto?’ asked Covenant, still unmoving. ‘Or one of the other of the Triumvirate?’

  ‘Triumvirate?’ she gave a mirthless chuckle. ‘Such an overly dramatic title. Talicto coined it himself. The man was always two parts a fool. But, yes, it was me that executed him in the end. He was past redemption by that time. Power without a guiding vision cannot be tolerated.’

  ‘And that power…’ Covenant shifted his gaze to the book on the lectern. ‘In your hands, that power is pure?’

  Idris released a slow breath between her teeth. Josef remembered the gesture from arguments long ago, the sign that her patience was moving towards anger.

  ‘Time is running out, Covenant. We can go from here as friends and comrades, just as we were before. You have been looking for salvation all these years you have been fighting. You can have it. You can help save mankind. You once believed that we could do that, now you truly can.’

  ‘You are right,’ said Covenant. Josef’s head snapped around, his mind rebelling against what he had just heard. ‘Time is running out.’

  Covenant looked at her, and then turned to look at Josef.

  ‘It’s not her,’ he said. And the psycannon on his shoulder spun towards Idris. Koleg’s pistol roared. Severita sprang forwards, lightning bright on her blade.

  Seventeen

  Covenant’s psycannon never fired. A las-bolt came out of the dark and tore the weapon from its mounting. Covenant jerked back. Sparks of feedback whipped up the cables of his mind-interface link as the gun was destroyed. He staggered, blood on his lips. Josef bellowed in rage and stepped forwards. Koleg’s pistol roared a tongue of micro-rounds at Idris.

  Severita had been moving forwards when the las-bolt struck her master. She pivoted. At the edge of her sight she saw the air around Idris erupt with explosions as Koleg’s burst of rounds flashed to sparks. She saw Enna Gyrid, crouched at the corner of a bookshelf, her las-carbine aimed level at Covenant’s reeling form. Enna’s face had a cold, blank expression behind the sight of her gun.