Horusian Wars: Resurrection

by John French

  ‘Is that meant to reassure us?’ called Cleander.

  The bones above them were clinking together faster, the dry sound rolling down the wide passage.

  ‘No,’ said Koleg.

  Josef was half dragging, half pushing Enna in front of him. The acolyte’s hands were empty. She looked naked, somehow, without a weapon. Severita’s gaze lingered for a second. She could see the rage in Josef’s face as he pushed Enna before him. She had never seen anything like it in the preacher. Even in the face of the most vile horror and heresy, his anger was always righteous. But in Josef’s wide eyes and set jaw she saw something else; his rage was not pure. It was pain, the shock of betrayal. It was very personal.

  Severita found that she wished she felt some of that anger towards Enna. But she did not. Idris’ heresy and deception, Enna’s complicity, it was not enough to produce anger. In a sense it was inevitable. In an unredeemed universe, what more could you expect?

  ‘The probability of reaching the hangar is low,’ said Glavius-4-Rho. The magos was dragging the catatonic form of the insane Navigator on the end of a chain. Gears ground under his robes as he pulled the dead weight along. Glavius-4-Rho had been waiting in the mouth of the passage out of the chamber. The daemons had formed a hissing wall at the corridor’s threshold, but had not gone into it.

  The corridor rocked and twisted. Severita caught her balance.

  ‘That was closer,’ said Koleg.

  ‘The hangar is near,’ shouted Cleander.

  The bones above them were swinging together, clacking, clacking.

  Covenant paused, halfway into a run. He looked up. The sound of the bones was getting louder, rising above the rumble passing through the floor. Cold light was beginning to ooze from the sigils cut into the bones.

  ‘The reason why the neverborn did not chase us down here…’ said Cleander.

  The bones hanging from the ceiling went suddenly still, frozen to pict-frame stillness. Quiet hung in the dark.

  ‘Run now,’ said Covenant.

  Severita’s muscles bunched.

  A river of red flame rushed across the ceiling. The hanging bones fell, and spun together. Wet muscle formed from fire and twined around the skeletons of monstrous creatures. A thing with the body of a flayed simian and the skull of a rotting goat landed on the floor in front of Severita as she sprang forwards. Her shoulder hit it in the chest. Something cracked with the sound of a gunshot and she surged on, twisting to fire a bolt-round into it as it clawed at her.

  Abominations crowded the passage: misshapen things with the limbs of beasts and men, their warp-spun flesh sizzling with heat. A spider formed of human legs skittered at Covenant as the inquisitor sprinted ahead of Severita. He swerved aside, pulling his shotgun from his back. The spider-creature’s body split. Rows of needle teeth lined the bleeding wound of a mouth. Covenant fired. The solid shotgun shell ripped the creature in two. It jigged, bare feet slapping on the floor. Covenant stepped forward, firing and racking the gun as he moved. A thing of back-slung legs and serrated jaws bounded over the bloody remains. Frost flashed in the air around Covenant, and a wall of telekinetic force punched the thing back. It shrieked in the voice of a burning murder of crows. Severita put a bolt in what remained of it before it could rise. She fell into place beside Covenant, sheathed one pistol, and drew her sword in a blur of movement. She only had a few shells left in her own weapons.

  Behind her she could hear Cleander swearing as he dodged and hacked. Koleg’s macro-stubber and grenade harness were long spent, and he was back to back with the tech-priest. Clusters of bones fell from the ceiling, assembling into nightmares as they fell. Josef was close to Koleg, his right hand gripping Enna’s arm. His hammer was across his back. He punched his left fist into a thing built of jackal skulls and human spines. The gauntlet covering his hand came back red, and he roared a prayer of rage into the thing’s faces as it fell.

  The last of their ammunition burned and roared out. Covenant was shoving forwards, waves of telekinetic force ripping formless creatures into the air. Bones broke. Wet meat ripped to mist. Five paces of blood-slicked decking cleared in front of them, and then the tide of horror swept back.

  Severita ducked as a barbed limb swung at her. She came up under the blow and sliced the limb from the creature’s main mass. Another beat of rhythm and she was weaving past it, spinning back, cutting, sliding past another blow from a clawed paw, and razoring the edge of the sword’s power field across a wobbling block of meat and teeth. She could kill like this for hours. In the convent sanctorum, she had once sung the sword-prayer for a full cycle of the sun without rest or pause. But she could do the same here, and still it would not be enough. For every killing cut there would be another creature spun from the warp.

  The tunnel shook around them again. Cracks spidered through the walls. Covenant’s face was set. Sweat was dripping from his brow and freezing as he rammed through the press of creatures with his mind. They had slowed, every pace bought with effort.

  She heard a cry from behind her, and turned to look as she made her next cut. Cleander was on the ground. Blood was dark on his coat, bloody hand still clutching his sword, red teeth locked in a bitten off scream. Koleg stepped over him, lashing a boot into a dog-skulled thing. It recoiled, and then snapped back, jaws wide.

  A sound that was not a sound for human ears tore through the air.

  Severita felt it drag across her senses. The smell of burning oil, the touch of feathers and claws, and the colour of fresh blood blotted out the prayer in her mind. The creatures staggered as though struck. They juddered in place, flesh cooking and limbs thrashing as the force holding them together unwound. Smoke and flame screamed from mouths. Their flesh powdered to black charcoal. It was over in the span of two heartbeats, and the sound and sensations vanished. Severita twisted to look back to where the sound had come from.

  Enna knelt on the deck. She must have shaken free of Josef, because he too was turning to look at her from a pace further away. She was coughing, choking on the black blood coming from her mouth.

  For a second it seemed as if the only sound was the plink of cooling metal, and the sigh of settling ashes.

  Enna looked up. Haemorrhages blotted the whites of her eyes.

  ‘Not much…’ she rasped. ‘Not much time…’

  And as though in answer, a hooting cry echoed down the passage from where they had just come.

  ‘Someone…’ gasped Cleander, ‘someone, by all that is holy on Terra, help me up.’

  ‘We are between the station and the rest of the salvoes,’ called Ghast.

  ‘Good,’ replied Viola. ‘Target them with everything we have, and roll to take damage across the keel line.’

  She heard the answer, but she was not listening. The action she had just ordered would not save them or anyone still on the Archive facility. Their guns were not enough to bring down the torpedo salvoes, and the Dionysia was not built to absorb that kind of punishment.

  She felt the deck lurch under her feet. Gravity was fluctuating across the ship. Servitors were screaming damage code. The asteroid was so close that its turning face blotted out the view of space beyond. Spirals of lightning danced over the station.

  ‘Do you have vox-reach into the station?’ she shouted.

  ‘We are not hearing anything, mistress.’

  ‘Ordnance impact in three minutes.’

  ‘Launch the recovery wing,’ she said, turning away from the displays and looking up at the looming shape beyond the crystal iris of the viewport. The space between the Dionysia and the asteroid was under three kilometres, narrow enough for a gunship to cross in minutes. But no gunship was coming from the asteroid, and a few minutes would see her and her ship dead.

  ‘Mistress…’

  ‘Launch them.’

  The warp was surging around them, bleaching reality into blank madness. The
only way for them to survive now was if the torpedo impact did not damage their warp engines. They could activate them and plunge wholly into the ether. Then they would just need to survive the wrath of the storm that waited for them in that other realm.

  ‘Impact in two…’

  ‘Mistress, a gunship has launched from the station.’

  ‘Vox?’

  ‘Intermittent connection, but we have a transponder lock. It’s Lord Covenant’s craft.’

  ‘Get our squadron around it and bring it in. Flush full power to warp engines. Prepare to translate on my command.’

  ‘Torpedo impact in one minute. Four warheads still active in the void. Impact will cripple us if we don’t–’

  ‘Warp fluctuations rising.’

  ‘Ready for warp translation.’

  In front of her, the asteroid began to glow. The cobwebs of lightning grew. Motes of light popped into being, spinning wildly in the vacuum. She felt her eyes begin to water. The asteroid shimmered, and then folded like a sheet of parchment crushed in a fist. Depth and distance sheered. Viola vomited, her mind struggling and then failing to process what her eyes were seeing. The crew were screaming.

  ‘Torpedo impact in thirty seconds!’ called a voice.

  ‘The Lord Covenant’s gunship and escort are closing.’

  ‘It’s not going to make it in time.’

  She wiped yellow bile from her chin.

  ‘Ten seconds to impact!’

  ‘Ship emerging from the other side of the asteroid. It’s a warship. Its weapons are armed.’

  ‘What is–’ began Viola.

  ‘It’s firing!’

  Viola felt cold reality close over her. It was going to end here. All of the steps of her life had led her to this point, and now they would stop. She looked away from the flow of ship data. At least it would mean leaving that behind.

  ‘Mistress, the ship!’ shouted Ghast. Viola’s head jerked around. Ghast was grinning, a wild, wide grin. ‘The ship… it’s the Valour’s Flame.’

  Her eyes found the pict screen in time to see a sheet of fire reach out from the warship to meet the torpedoes. The explosion was close enough that debris and flame touched the Dionysia’s hull.

  Viola punched her fist into her palm. She looked at Ghast.

  ‘Signal them to raise Gellar Fields and prepare to follow us.’

  ‘They acknowledge, and confirm that their warp engines are already primed.’

  ‘Covenant’s gunship?’

  ‘On board.’

  ‘Light the warp engines.’

  A buzzing sensation rose through the frame of the ship. A shiver ran across her skin. Outside the void boiled with impossible colour as space folded around them. Purple lightning caged the Dionysia and the Valour’s Flame, flaring as the two ships pulled themselves across the barrier of reality and into the depths of the warp.

  On the rattling floor of the gunship, Enna looked up as the rear hatch opened. The eyes of Severita, Koleg and Josef looked down at her from set faces. There was no kindness in them. Glavius-4-Rho shuffled down the ramp, Cleander supported by his mechadendrites, dragging Titus Yeshar behind him. Amber lights were flashing in the hangar beyond the hatch. She recognised the taut feeling across her skin that meant the ship was within the warp, riding its tides in the bubble of its Gellar field.

  They had made it. They had survived. She had survived.

  Shards of thoughts and memories shifted in her skull, images and facts rising and then sinking back into dark water. Through it all a thread of terror ran cold and sharp.

  Who am I? Every answer that sprang into the light felt like a lie spoken by a friend.

  She felt the silver coin still in her hand.

  What am I?

  The answer hissed at her in the half-memories of her gun rising to shoot Covenant, and the image of Idris, alive and standing in a radiance of white light and shadow.

  Renewed…

  You are… Renewed…

  Twin sets of memories swirled and merged in her skull: her life as an acolyte, her loyalty, her service, and with those, eating the chances of the life she remembered being true, were memories of drowning, of rag masks, of rising from the dark of death with new life.

  But that is not true, she thought. I am not that. I am…

  You are Renewed.

  ‘What do we do with her?’ asked Cleander, his voice falling like a metal hammer onto iron.

  ‘She is one of them,’ said Josef. ‘One of the Renewed. Her mind must have been resculpted.’

  ‘To what purpose?’ asked Koleg, tilting his head as he stared at her ‘To watch? To kill?’

  Covenant stood from where he had sat, and turned towards the hatch. Red and orange light blinked across his face as he paused at the top of the ramp.

  ‘Keep her alive. We have matters to attend to before we take the next step. Confine her until then.’ He began down the ramp after the retreating form of Glavius-4-Rho.

  ‘And then?’ asked Josef.

  ‘She goes to Mylasa,’ said Covenant without pausing. ‘And we will have answers.’

  Epilogue

  TRUTHS

  Covenant paused. From where he stood at the side of the chamber, Josef saw his eye linger on the flickering projection of Vult. The daemon manifesting above him blurred and pixelated. In the trench ringing the centre of the amphitheatre, the choir of psykers swayed and shivered as they moaned their chants. The protective nets of circuitry glowed as the image of Vult’s last moments tugged at the skin of reality. Artefacts lay on obsidian benches beside Covenant: the crystal venom-dagger, a rag mask of the Renewed, the coin taken from one of the cultist’s mouths. Each object had played its part in the tale Covenant had told his assembled peers. They had listened in silence as he had outlined the trail he had followed after the massacre at Ero. Some of the assembly had been at Ero and survived, but most were newly arrived, drawn to the sector and the conclave that Covenant had called after the incursion of the warp and the death of so many of their fellow inquisitors. They had come to hear what this young inquisitor had to say, and – though no one had said it aloud – to judge him.

  ‘Lord Inquisitor Vult, blessed in the sight of the God-Emperor of us all, fell against the daemons summoned by the heretic Talicto’s art,’ said Covenant. ‘His sacrifice ensured that we could bring the knowledge of what we found here.’

  The holo-projected image folded out of existence.

  ‘And you are certain that you discovered and removed the full extent of this… corruption?’

  It was Malika Quadin that spoke. The last of Vult’s close associates had sat utterly still while Covenant talked; now she leaned forward in her high-backed chair, the pearls hanging from her diadem swaying as she raised her chin.

  There are three of them. The witch, the wanderer, and the priest.

  The eyes of the rest of the assembly followed her. Josef spun the silver coin they had taken from Enna through his fingers.

  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.

  Covenant looked up, and Josef saw his dark eyes moving over the circles of seats. On his shoulder the mind-linked sensor pod turned in a slow circle.

  From here we trust no one, he had said, aboard the Dionysia. No one.

  ‘Yes,’ said Covenant. ‘It began with Talicto. It ended with him.’

  The sensor pod swivelled to point at Malika Quadin as Covenant returned her stare.

  ‘Then you have done the Emperor’s service, Inquisitor Covenant,’ she said. ‘There are… deliberations that have to be made, and our comrades mourned, but I – and I will be bold, and say that I speak for those assembled here – thank you for what you have done.’

  Covenant gave a short nod.

  ‘Truth
is its own reward,’ he said, and walked from the centre of the amphitheatre. Josef remained in place a moment after his master had passed, then followed. On his back, he felt the cold gaze of watching eyes.

  The sculpting tools clicked to stillness. Beneath their tips the face of Inquisitor Idris stared up at Viola. The creases under the left eye were still glistening as the red wax hardened. Covenant sat at his desk, fingers steepled under his chin, facing away from both the workbench and the sculpture sitting at its centre.

  ‘It might not have been her,’ said Viola carefully. ‘She could have died in the tower just as we thought. Talicto might have faked his own death. This talk of a Triumvirate of Horusians could just be misdirection.’

  Covenant did not move. Behind him the fingers of mind-linked sculpting tools folded into themselves with a whisper of tiny gears.

  ‘It could be,’ he said.

  Viola glanced at where Josef stood at her side. The preacher was looking at the silver and gold faces covering the walls of Covenant’s sanctuary. He seemed older, though she could not say why.

  ‘Enna,’ he said, not looking at either Covenant or Viola. ‘If it was not Idris, then explain how Enna is one of the Renewed.’

  ‘Enna could have been–’ began Viola.

  ‘It was Idris,’ said Josef, his voice hard. ‘It was her, from the beginning. She did not die in the tower. The death we saw was… an illusion for our benefit.’

  ‘How can you be certain?’ snapped Viola. ‘The data from everything we found is far from conclusive.’

  ‘It fits,’ said Josef, and now he sounded tired, as though the harshness of a moment before had exhausted him. ‘She… It fits.’

  ‘And now?’ asked Viola. ‘You said she triggered the warp vortex in Talicto’s archive. Could she have survived?’

  ‘Too dangerous to assume she is dead this time,’ said Josef. ‘The dead seem to find the grave a weak prison of late.’

  ‘Thank you both for your council,’ said Covenant. He disconnected the mind interface cable from the base of his skull and stood. ‘Gather everyone in an hour. There are things that must be done before we begin.’