by John French
Covenant broke from the smoke and whirl of madness. Lightning was blazing around his sword. Tears and burns marked his armour, blood and soot his face. Severita was with him, spinning her sword to slice half-formed limbs reaching at them.
The gun in Vult’s hand silenced as he looked at Covenant.
‘If you knew of this…’ he rasped.
‘Then I would not have come here to die,’ said Covenant, taking a hand from the hilt of his sword, drawing a bolt pistol and firing a cluster of shells at a creature of bubbling flesh.
‘Would you not die for your beliefs?’ said Vult.
The two held each other’s gaze for an instant. Even in Koleg’s emotionally-truncated world, he felt the weight of the moment: the balance.
‘I did not know,’ shouted Covenant. The etheric wind was rising to a gale. Chunks of burning books and splintered wood were floating into the air. Beyond the gunfire, a shape was looming up and up, darker than night.
Vult did not reply, but turned back to the deepening wall of living shadows and fired a fresh stream of star-bright rounds into the dark.
‘Go,’ he said, pausing for a second. ‘Go now, get to one of the ships. There can be no victory if someone does not live to know the truth.’
‘Lord Vult…’ began Covenant.
‘You were right,’ rasped Vult. His bodyguards had locked into position again, pistons bracing, heat vents flaring down their backs. ‘In the conclave on Ero, you were right. If we lose this fight, then victory has no meaning.’
‘We…’ called Covenant.
‘Go!’ roared Vult.
‘Do we withdraw, sir?’ asked Koleg.
‘Yes,’ said Covenant.
Koleg was already up and moving. Plasma bloomed in the dark, in the direction of a gap between the shelves. He blinked just at the moment of detonation, the flash outlining the veins in his eyelids. He opened his eyes and sent bursts of rounds into the space either side of the explosion. Folds of half-etheric flesh ripped apart. Covenant and Severita were moving past him and Josef, running towards the space opened by the dimming sphere of plasma.
A movement snagged the edge of his sight, and he looked down at where a heap of ash and burning parchments had fallen off a blazing shelf. A face looked up at him, darkened with ash, and a figure stumbled towards him. Glowing cinders fell from her. He could see cloth and flesh through the holes burned through her armour. Her weapon had gone, but she had one hand clutched tight and pressed to her chest. Her eyes met his.
‘Koleg…’ she said. Behind her, the blaze of burning pages and scrolls was growing writhing limbs and grinning faces.
He brought his gun up.
‘Koleg, please,’ said Enna Gyrid.
Koleg pulled the trigger.
Josef saw Enna stumble from the smoke and fire, and saw Koleg aim and fire.
‘Alive!’ hissed Covenant from bloody lips. ‘I want her alive.’ The burst of micro-rounds skimmed past Enna and sliced into the creatures solidifying in the flames behind her. The mass of limbs and mouths thrashed.
Enna stumbled forwards, her face pale beneath the soot and blood. Josef stepped forwards and swung his hammer. Snatching the direction of his hammer blow, he swept Enna’s legs out from under her. He rammed his weight into her as she fell, and she hit the floor with bone-cracking force. She gasped as her lungs emptied. He had seen her fight, had seen how fast and how deadly she was, but he had been a killer and then a teacher of killers for all the years of his long life, and in that moment none of her skill mattered because the rage that shook through him was a storm-surge. He raised the hammer, felt his muscles bunch, heard the killing call cackling in his ears as the fire drowned his eyes in the instant of the hammer’s rise.
‘Alive, Khoriv!’ Covenant’s voice was a steel lash through the air. Enna’s eyes were looking up at him, dark, and full of a fear that somehow he knew was not for the fall of the hammer.
‘You…’ he gasped. ‘You will be judged. You and your mistress.’
‘I can’t…’ began Enna.
‘Make sure she survives,’ said Covenant.
‘Yes…’ Josef nodded, air sawing from his chest. He could taste the blood in each breath. His eyes were swimming with smudges of light. His head felt like something was burrowing inside it. He looked around. Wind, ash, flame and light howled through the air around them. Shadows waiting for shape flowed closer, sharks circling prey in red-marked water. The opening in the walls of shelves they had been making for seemed distant, the two dozen paces between it and them an infinity.
The cliff of burning shelves to his right dissolved into a cloud of fire and shrapnel. He flinched back. Shelves to either side of the explosion began to collapse with a roar of splintering wood and cracking iron. Fragments burned, some falling upwards, some towards the floor.
Cleander von Castellan came out of the smoke and debris. His face was a mask of pain. The patch over his left eye was lost, the empty socket beneath filled with clotting blood from a gash on his forehead. Black, crusting slime caked his sword.
‘I hope the plan is that we are leaving,’ said Cleander.
‘Kade.’ The voice came out of the blank white infinity that held her. ‘Kade, I know you can hear me.’
Kade Zecker did not open her eyes. She did not move. Nothing moved. She would not let anything move. She would not see anything.
‘Kade, please let me go, let them go.’
She tried to shut out the voice. She knew she could, but to do that she would have to open her eyes. And she would not open her eyes.
‘You can save them, Kade – you are their captain. This is your ship. All you have to do is let them go.’
She blinked and the fire poured back in from outside. She saw.
The bridge of the Valour’s Flame was a frozen tableau around her. The deck was twisted and glowing with heat. Torn metal plates and rivets hung on the edge of a burning shockwave. Her crew were still figures: caught in the act of running, turning away, staring in shock and terror. And then, before she could stop it, her sight was racing out through the bones of her ship and into the darkness beyond, and the stars were motes spinning in the black froth of infinity, and the fire poured and pulled her on, and the dark and light and spinning infinities were folding and folding, until there was no space, no light, no darkness, no time, and the fire was a branching pattern drawn in arcs through dimensions that humans could not see, and–
She closed her eyes. Her scream echoed inside her skull.
‘Kade,’ said the voice. ‘You need to listen to me.’
‘Silence! Silence! Silence! Silence! Silence!’
Rage flared, red against the white. Kade felt truths unfold inside her as the emotion reached somewhere she could not see and pulled them into her.
‘Mylasa…’ she snarled, and knew that the words did not come from her lips but carried all the spite and anger at what was happening to her, at what she was. ‘Mylasa is not even your name. That was never your name. You are a thief of dreams, a parasite. You do not even remember who you really are. Do you want to know who you were? Do you want to know what you could have been? Do you want to remember?’
In the white she saw the image of the woman in green, but where before she had been serene and calm, now she was bruised and bloody, her dress scorched to tatters, her hands shaking with effort and pain.
‘I am sorry,’ said Mylasa. ‘I am so sorry, Kade, but please.’
Kade snarled and the image of Mylasa staggered. Wounds opened on her skin. Fresh blood slicked her skin.
‘Please…’ said Mylasa. ‘You have a choice. You have a choice, Kade. Just–’
Kade opened her eyes.
She looked.
A coldness crept into her, as though a part of her that was stronger than she had dreamed had slid into the space vacated by her fear, as though she had to
uched and connected to something as vast as an ocean, dark as the abyss between stars, and that burned without light or heat.
She felt the flow of time that she was holding back surround her, felt it tug against her mind.
‘I am going to die,’ she said.
Mylasa began to shake her head, but Kade spoke first.
‘I am going to die here. In five seconds I am going to die. My body is going to be annihilated as my connection to what you call the warp overwhelms my capacity to control it. The… things that you call daemons will come for the echo of my dreams as I expire. They will pull the carcass of my being apart.’
‘Kade…’
‘No, Mylasa, it is a certainty,’ she said, and part of her was listening to herself speak as well as speaking. ‘I have seen it. Time is a flat plain, Mylasa. Life is the line we draw across it. I have died already. We have all died already.’
‘Oh, God Emperor…’ said Mylasa. ‘You are not just an emergent, you are an Alpha Plus. You are–’
‘Names… numbers… What I am is not a code or a measurement. I am not Kade Zecker. I am what we might all be one day. But now is too soon for me, and now will not last.’
‘God–’
‘No,’ said Kade’s voice, and she could feel the next words and thoughts forming in a mind that was not really hers anymore, but was something greater and more terrible than she had ever dreamed. She paused, and felt a thought form in the totality of her mind. She saw the ship that she had called home. She saw the atoms spinning in the flesh of the dying and the living. She saw the threads of consequence and possibility.
‘You need to listen, Mylasa. It is no random chance that this has happened to me. The seeds of transcendence are growing in humanity, and in this place and time the universe is aligning to see them flower. There will be others. The Storms of Judgement, the dreams of terror, the prayers of the desperate, they are… they are like ripples in water, ripples that are merging, ripples that will become a wave to drown all.’
‘What are you?’ asked Mylasa.
Kade Zecker smiled to herself, allowing an instant of halted time to pass so that the charred lips of her flesh could move.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you for trying to help me, Mylasa. Remember me.’
And she let go of her last thought. Time crashed back into motion. The fire spreading through the deck of the Valour’s Flame sucked backwards through the air. Metal plates, rivets and debris spun back into place, fusing and straightening. Blood siphoned back into wounds as skin closed. Life kindled in stilled hearts, as the fallen crew members gasped air into lungs. Some looked up at where Kade Zecker hung in the air above, glowing white, a smile on her lips as the atoms of her flesh became ash, and then vanished in a thunderclap of light.
Josef staggered towards where Cleander stood beside the breach he had blown in the long wall of bookcases. Covenant and Severita were already up and running towards the opening. Koleg had switched from pistol to his compact grenade launcher, and was pumping explosives and phosphor back into the space they had just left. Everything was sound and movement, and the taste of rot and crushed flowers.
‘God Emperor…’ he began, but the words of prayer were vanishing into a hurricane force of sensations pulling his thoughts apart.
‘Faster would be better,’ called Cleander, hacking at something congealing in the smoke. ‘I have run all the way here and I am keen to run back where I just came from.’
‘Ready to move,’ shouted Koleg. Covenant and Severita reached the breach, turned and began to fire in concert.
‘Moving,’ called Koleg, and ran.
‘Up! Move!’ Josef yanked Enna to her feet and shoved her after them. They ran. A long head with a grin of iron teeth loomed to the right of his path. He swung his hammer into its snout, saw it drop back. The wind pulled at him, but then he felt the force of the wind and pressure in his skull shift, as though something had drawn it off.
Josef glanced behind him as he ran.
And saw what had bought them the small easing in the storm.
Vult and his guards were firing up at a shadow which curled above them. The shadow was billowing into the space above, folding into a shape. Cracks of red fire ran through it. Molten claws spread, dripping white hot metal. Red eyes opened in a vast vulpine skull. The beams of the troopers’ guns struck it and bored into its substance. It moved forward, jaws lolling open in a brass-toothed grin. The air reeked of hot metal and hacked meat. Vult raised his power fist. Cords of blue fire snaked over his armour. For an instant he was a statue, effort screaming from his stillness. A bolt of blinding light hammered out from Vult. It struck the daemon and ripped through its shadow-form. Shreds of fire fell as the creature recoiled, the edges of its body smudging to a black haze. Vult held still, light pouring from him, his armour glowing. Howling mouths opened on the daemon’s iron skin. Yellow heat and red anger poured out.
Josef felt the light of Vult’s psychic projection fill his eyes. In that brief glimpse he saw something that he knew he would carry with him into prayer and nightmare: a man standing before the dark; the light of his will, the light of his soul a lance stabbed into the hungering maw that would swallow it. It was beautiful, and terrible – an image of the truth of all that the Ordo Malleus was, and should be. It was enough to break minds, and turn those who saw it into martyrs.
The daemon recoiled, cloven hooves shaking the air and floor.
‘Khoriv,’ called Cleander. ‘Khoriv, you fat bastard, stop staring and run.’
Josef tore his eyes away, and ran through the breach in the blazing shelves and into the twilight beyond. The others were in front of him, firing and hacking to clear their path of the lesser creatures which had shrunk back from the presence of the greater of their kin. He did not look back. He didn’t want to. He didn’t need to. He knew what was happening without needing to see it.
Thirty paces into the rows of shelves, a rolling peal of thunder shivered through the air, trembling with triumph, shaking with fury.
Nineteen
‘We can’t do it,’ said Ghast. Viola looked at the void mistress. Ghast’s round face looked gouged by shadow in the red glow of the alert lights. Alarms blared throughout the bridge without cease. The Dionysia shook and shook more violently with every second it plunged deeper into the ruined space around the asteroid station. Ghast glanced around as another flurry of damage data spewed from the mouths of the servitors in the machine trenches beneath the command platform. ‘We can’t outrun torpedoes, mistress.’
Viola met the veteran void sailor’s gaze, and knew that the woman was right. At best guess, there were between two and three pairs of torpedoes running through the void to the asteroid station. The enemy frigate had fired the torpedoes just before it had made a sliding roll and powered away from the rift that was swallowing the station.
‘Well,’ said Viola, and felt a strange kick of joy in her gut. ‘We are going to see if we can.’ She grinned, the feeling of the expression on her face another surprise. ‘Get us more speed.’
‘Aye, Mistress von Castellan,’ said Ghast, and turned to begin a fresh litany of shouts.
‘And start bringing the warp engines online,’ added Viola.
She felt rather than saw Ghast look around at her. Viola did not look back at her. She was looking forward beyond the viewport, down the length of the Dionysia to where its prow cut through the billowing clouds of light and lightning. The data clattering from the command systems and scrolling across the pict-screens was forgotten. The compulsion for information and control hacked and stamped into her brain was still there, but for this moment seemed lessened, unimportant. She was reasonably sure that she and the ship were going to end here, torn apart and broken on the clashing boundary between the warp and the real. And she did not care. She was herself. Not a dutiful scion of her line, not a functionary shaped by training and obligation. Jus
t what she always had been, and wanted to be.
‘Well,’ she said, feeling the grin on her face. ‘What are you waiting for?’
Only one of the first pair of torpedoes hit its target. The other ran through a sheet of twisting space and vanished before it could run its course. Its remaining twin cut through the last kilometres of warp-violated space and struck the edge of the station clinging to the asteroid. The warhead was a mass of plasma wrapped around a reactor core, and swallowed a five hundred metre section in a sphere of light.
The asteroid’s spin slowed, turning its gouged face as molten rock and metal scattered into space. Ghostly claws and faces opened in the darkness, shouting and laughing.
Within the station, waves of burning gas roared through the passages and chambers near the impact. Halls hung with dusted tapestries were incinerated, vanishing in the flame’s roar. The rock heaved with shockwaves. Long trunks of tunnel connecting parts of the station on the surface ripped free like lines of torn stitching.
In the main passage leading back to the hangar, Severita felt the impact as a shiver beneath her feet, but did not pause.
‘Ordnance strike,’ called Koleg from behind her.
Above her, the bones hanging from the ceiling clattered together.
‘Keep moving!’ shouted Josef, from the back of the group. ‘If whoever is shooting at the station gets lucky then we might die, but if the daemons catch us we certainly will.’
‘They are not following,’ said Koleg. Severita looked back, and saw that Koleg was right.
