by John French
Severita leapt. Enna jerked her gun up, even as Severita’s sword arced down.
Time slowed as death balanced on the edge of the next instant.
Severita’s blow struck. The gun exploded in Enna’s hands as the power field sliced through its casing. She reeled, but caught her fall and spun its momentum into a blow that thumped into Severita’s gut. Severita’s breath gasped from her lungs as she cannoned backwards. She tried to roll to her feet, but another kick caught her solar plexus with enough force and precision to steal the remaining air from her lungs. Enna was above her, blank-eyed, a pistol already held in her charred hands. There was no trace of pain or emotion on Enna’s face. Severita realised that no matter how fast she moved, she would not beat the bullet that was about to come from the barrel.
At last, she thought.
A wave of force picked Enna up and slammed her into the air like a thrown doll. Severita leapt to her feet.
Covenant was just metres away, ghost-light and frost haloing his head. She caught his eye for an instant and then he was moving, advancing on Idris, sword rising. Cold lightning crackled around Idris’ skull. The air shimmering between the inquisitors was like churning water as psychic power poured from them in raw waves. Covenant cut and cut, light flashing as his sword struck the shells of psychic power enclosing Idris. Blood was flowing from his nose. Idris’ face was set, her eyes dark holes of night. Light was distorting around her, twisting, sucking in, as though inhaled into her shadow.
‘Don’t do this, Covenant,’ she said. ‘There are things you do not understand. This does not have to be death for you.’
Gunfire ripped the air as Koleg blazed at Idris. The micro-rounds melted as they met the darkening halo around her. Covenant attacked without cease, his blade and footwork never faltering as bullets poured past him. Severita sprinted to his side, firing as she moved. Explosions blossomed around Idris. Severita saw the inquisitor falter, and lunged the point of her sword at Idris’ throat. Idris turned and looked at Severita. Force slammed through her bones. She felt razor edges rip at the inside of her flesh. She froze, unable to move. A high wailing noise was filling her skull.
Idris gave a tiny shake of her head. Blood-stained sweat was pouring from her skin.
‘I can give you no more time to consider it,’ she said to Covenant.
Severita felt the ash-laden air spiral against her frozen skin. A tiny dust devil was rising from the floor beside her. She saw Covenant’s eyes flick to it as he swung another blow.
‘You have given us time enough,’ he said.
Columns of lightning flashed into being around them. Blinding light and the smell of ozone flooded the air. Figures stood in the flashes of light, figures in black armour and mirror visors. And with them, clad in gold and ivory, was Inquisitor Lord Vult.
Idris turned, and the roiling aura of power around her flickered for an instant as she saw the daemonhunter lord.
‘Idris,’ he said. ‘You are called to judgement.’
Covenant scythed his sword around, lightning dragging in a smear from its edge. Idris jerked back, the cloak of etheric energy twisting and billowing as it tried to catch the blow. A bubble of blue flame formed and shattered as the sword cut through the shimmering barrier and ripped her legs apart in a detonation of light. Idris fell. A shriek echoed through the churning air.
Covenant stepped forwards, blade low. The remains of the psycannon on his shoulder twitched. His face was covered with blood.
‘Covenant, step back from her,’ called Vult as he came forwards, his tread shaking the stone floor.
Idris was scrabbling on the ground, blood bright on her lips, red soaking the tangle of her layered robes. Covenant looked down at her, and raised the sword.
‘Covenant, step back!’ shouted Vult. ‘This place is at the centre of an etheric cyclone. Do not–’
‘You will not have revelation,’ rasped Idris, her voice still somehow calm. ‘You are a false pilgrim, old friend.’
Her right hand slammed into the red-washed floor beneath her. Witch-fire wreathed the bloody fingers. Covenant’s cut severed her right arm above the elbow, but it was too late.
Forks of lightning sprang into the air. Covenant staggered back. Black tears opened above them. Dust and ash were falling upwards from the floor. Burning winds burst outwards. Idris was gone. Howling shreds of colour and shadow darted through the spreading blackness. Severita felt nausea fill her throat as the skin of reality split and the realm beyond poured through the wound.
‘A psyker?’ said Kade. Around her the blank black world was utterly still. This must be a dream, she thought.
‘No, it is not a dream,’ said Mylasa. ‘I wish it were. At this instant you are perhaps a few heartbeats away from destroying everything and everyone on your ship. Here we have time, more time than we do out there, but not much more.’
‘This can’t be true. How could I–’
‘Because you have been touched by something that it is beyond your spirit to control,’ said Mylasa. ‘Covenant did not know that before he took your ship, but… we should have realised. I should have realised. There are signs. There are always signs. I should have noticed.’
‘Noticed what?’
Mylasa looked down at the pearl-white nails of her right hand.
‘The dreams, Kade. The dreams that were half memory, half waking. The way that you are sometimes just a beat off from the rhythm of time. The way that you are afraid and angry all at the same time, and don’t know why. Those are all signs of the fact that your mind has cracks, and the warp has found them, and is trying to pull them wider.’
‘The warp? But I don’t understand. I know the warp – it is…’
‘It is the nightmare realm that you travel through and never see its true nature, Kade. Things… move within it.’
‘Those are just stories. It’s just a way of crossing the void.’
‘No. No, it’s not. The warp is power, and corruption, and temptation and hate. It is a sea filled with monsters that want nothing more than to pull the skin off reality and eat it while it screams. Those powers might be called gods, the smallest part of their strength daemons, and the whole might be called Chaos. This is the truth. The truth that you are not allowed to know.’
‘I have never–’
‘Yes, you have, Kade. I have seen it tucked away in your memory like a tumour. You have seen Chaos, and being here, right now, so close to what is happening, has finally brought it to the surface of your soul.’
‘This…’ she said, blinking, feeling as though she should feel tears on her cheeks even though there were none. ‘This place… it’s like drowning. I close my eyes and I see. I see.’
‘That is our fault. Reality here was a fraying shroud, and now something terrible is happening, and the warp is screaming.’ She paused. ‘As I said, I should have realised sooner.’
‘Why don’t you just kill me?’
Mylasa laughed.
‘Good question. And the answer is that I do not have the time, and I don’t have the strength. Emergents like you… well, you are strong, getting stronger by the nanosecond. So the best option I have is to try to help you keep a lid on it.’
Kade heard something behind her that might have been the hiss of a breath leaving a mouth. She turned to look.
‘Look at me, Kade,’ said the woman softly.
The commander felt the tug of instinct to look in the direction of the sound.
‘Look at me. Yes, that’s it, just at me. Good.’ The young woman smiled encouragingly.
Kade swallowed. They were there again, the ghost ships, the silent corridors, the soft…
The woman’s eyes were steady on her, the pupils wide and black.
‘There were three,’ said Kade, and she could hear tears and pain and anger in the words. ‘We found them off the edge of a system in the Sh
anoian Margin–’
‘Kade, stop. You have to stop.’
‘We had been pushed off our patrol course by storms. They were wrecks more than ships, heavily damaged, tumbling on momentum. At first we could not get a vox return from them, but… but then we did–’
‘Shut it out, Kade. Don’t go back there. It’s their way in. Shut the–’
‘There were voices. Lots of voices. They were all over the signal spectrum, they were… they were screaming. We launched an away party to the nearest one. I led it. I wanted to…’
It had been so quiet. She had never felt or heard quiet like that on a void ship before.
‘Kade, please, I can’t hold you here much longer. You need to turn–’
‘Nothing,’ she shook her head. ‘Nothing and no one. Not even any bodies or blood. There was air still trapped in the hull, but no one trying to breathe it. We found no one, no one screaming… Until we reached the bridge.’
The face set in the smooth wall of soft skin, its eyes open.
‘Oh… God Emperor, help… us…’ it said, and the floor and walls and ceiling moved as it breathed.
Blackness, sudden and swift as a falling curtain, and the blackness around her was an image of the bridge of her ship, but an image that was moving with broken-clock slowness. Heat was flashing across the metal deck in cherry-red waves.
‘Help us… Please help us…’
Kade…+
She felt bile rise in her throat. The pain in her skull was a hammer. She just needed… she just needed…
In Kade’s eyes the ghost ship was weeping flame and debris, corpses stumbling from its wounds.
Kade, stop.+ The voice calling her was a distant shout. +You must stop, you must listen… you will listen…+
‘We need you… let us…’
She wanted to stop it, wanted to sleep in silence, to tear the ghosts from her head, to be able to let go.
‘Let go… please help us…
Kade!+
An inferno enveloped Kade. Pale ropes of heat spun around her, as a crack within her soul split wide, and the terror which had been following her flowed out. She lifted into the air. The deck beneath her glowed red. Ensign Luco jerked back, his uniform, hair and skin flaring as it ignited. The servitors in cradles close to her began to burn, flesh cooking even as they tried to execute their functions. The troopers in red carapace fired. Las-bolts converged on the avatar of fire rising into the air above them. They spun away like stones thrown into a tornado. The crew on the rest of the bridge were running cowering from the heat, their clothes smoking, their lungs filling with burning air. Rounds cooked off in the breeches of their shot-cannons.
In her cocoon of blind emotion, Kade roared, and the fire of the warp roared with her. Emotion filled her and poured into the world. Every scrap of fear she had ever felt, every wish she had cherished and seen denied, every moment when hate had been more powerful than reason: all of it rose into her, blinding bright, painted in colours of blood and fire.
She was a child again, being pushed by her nurse through high doors to meet a woman in a blue and silver uniform that looked at her with cold eyes.
‘Greet your mother, Kade,’ the nurse had said.
A wave of force ripped out from her. Plates tore from the command deck and spun into the air. The human bridge crew were cowering and running.
She was a lieutenant feeling her hands shake on the hilt of her sword as the corridor in front of her filled with smoke and screams, and a deck ganger came out of it, swinging a piston-wrench, and she was thrusting her sword forward, screaming a cry of fear and rage as she stabbed and hacked, and felt the blade bite into muscle and bone, and somehow she was still alive and still screaming.
One of the armsmen on the bridge levelled his shotcannon around the side of a bank of controls. His finger squeezed the trigger at the same moment that his body was slammed into the floor. Armour and bones broke. Telekinetic force yanked him up into the air, crushing his body like a ripe fruit squeezed in a fist.
She was standing before Admiral Glate, hearing the applause of the fleet officers as the new commander pins gleamed on her collar. Warm pride radiated from the smile that she could not keep from her face.
Waves of heat and pressure gripped the bridge’s deck and support pillars. Metal creaked. Kade’s mind flickered between images, her senses flooded.
Beyond the bounds of the bridge she saw with eyes that pierced the metal and flesh. She saw the minds of its thousands of crew as glimmers of candle flame in the dark sea of souls. The commands of the officers high on the cruiser’s spine turned in their minds like half-formed cogs. The sweat of ratings on the lower decks hung in the air, the molecules within each drop buzzing like insects caught in a bottle. She could change them, she realised; she could take the next instant of reality and remake it. All she needed to do was breathe in, to draw the cords of existence to her. It was all in her power to decide.
This… thought Kade, this is what it must be to be divine.
‘Kade.’ The woman in green was standing before her, fire-streaked grey clouds boiling behind her. The poise of her slim features was marred by ash, and by wounds which wept black blood onto the silk of her robe. ‘Kade, please listen.’
Kade felt a wave of confusion crash through her. The woman in green raised her hands as a blizzard of cinders lashed her. Somewhere beyond the world that she was seeing, metal sheared and melted.
‘You must listen,’ said the woman, forcing herself forward. ‘I am not here to fight you. I cannot fight you. But I can help you.’
Kade trembled. Confusion boiled through her. The woman in green flinched as though struck. Cracks opened across her skin. She was…
On the bridge of the Valour’s Flame, two spheres of light exploded against each other. Ropes of burning ectoplasm fell to the torn and burning deck.
‘This is your ship, Kade,’ said the woman. ‘These are your crew. Look at them. They trust you. Look at them. Listen to me. You can choose–’
‘I…’ began Kade. ‘I can see… I can see it all.’
‘Something is happening to the Valour’s Flame,’ said Ghast from beside Viola. ‘Throne of Terra, it is…’
Almost all sensor data had failed across the bridge screens. The displays were now little more than crude indications of rough positions of ships and objects. Every other scrap of information was being sweated from the systems by the crew and shouted out as it happened. She looked at the open view beyond the ports. She had ordered the blast shields dropped as soon as the sensors went down. Basic optical enhancement seemed to be the least affected by the phenomena, and so crew were now pressing their eyes to the viewpieces of lens and mirror systems. Given what was happening in the void around the asteroid station, Viola would rather they saw nothing.
The Valour’s Flame rolled over, twisting like a fish on a hook. Pale light glowed through its hull, cracking armour and pouring molten slag into the vacuum. Strands of blue-green light spidered and flashed through the dark around the stricken ship, blinking like lightning. Swirls of colour spun and burst. Depth and distance flexed. A funnel of lightning and violet light was yawning before it. Even looking at the image of it on a pict-screen made Viola taste blood and bitter fruit.
A jolt ran through the deck. Viola swayed, and caught her balance.
‘What was that?’ she called.
‘Gravity fluctuation,’ buzzed one of the tech-priests in the machine pit below the command dais. ‘We are within the orbit of a planet-sized gravity field.’
‘Source?’
‘Unknown,’ said the tech-priest, voice buzzing with panic. ‘Unable to calculate.’
‘We are moving,’ called Ghast. The ship lurched again.
‘Full power to thrusters,’ called Viola. ‘Hold our position.’
‘Reactor output eight-seven-point-five.’
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‘Throne!’ swore Ghast from the edge of the command dais. Viola looked around. Ghast was staring up at the space beyond the open viewports. Viola looked up. And felt the deck fall from beneath her, even as it lurched beneath her feet. The light cruiser Sixth Hammer filled the view, suddenly and impossibly close as distances collapsed. She could see the muzzles of their guns, and the lights dotting their turret towers. Beyond the two ships, the fabric of space was cracking. The whirl of indigo light was opening wide. Lightning crackled within its spiral.
‘Evasive action!’ shouted Viola. The ship’s thrusters fired. The servitors monitoring the engine and reactor outputs howled. Viola felt her stomach rise up her throat as the Dionysia flipped over. The hull creaked and shivered. Ghast was shouting orders, crew clinging onto their consoles or trying to run across the deck. Viola looked up at the turning image through the viewport, and had time to see the bulk of the Sixth Hammer try to turn out of the vortex that had hold of it. It twisted, kilometres of armour and metal shearing and bending like a tree flexing in a gale. It fired its guns, roaring defiance with a full broadside. Plasma, las and macro-shells streamed into the void, kissed the warp-saturated dark, and broke into a shattered kaleidoscope of colour and fire. The vortex seemed to open wider. Vast faces leered in the dark. Jaws of fire reached to scrap the cruiser’s hull, caressing, tearing, clutching it and dragging it into the depths of the nether realm. Then it was as though the Sixth Hammer had never been. And the vortex opened wide to greet the Dionysia.
‘Engines full burn!’ shouted Ghast.
Viola felt the ship kick. The hull wailed as the pull of the vortex dragged at it. Viola gritted her teeth, swallowed the bile rising in her throat.
‘Get us clear and then come about, full burn,’ she called. Some of the crew looked at her, and she could see the terror in their eyes. Even Ghast was looking pale. ‘We have to reach the asteroid facility. Get us through the warp break, and fast.’
