Vaults of Terra: The Carrion Throne

by Chris Wraight

  Gorgias stayed where it was. ‘Iterum.’

  ‘There is no point. I have already run scans.’

  Gorgias whirled around to face her, its eye flaring an angry crimson. ‘Stupidus! No universa arma augur matrix, no, no.’

  Spinoza halted. ‘Do you have something?’

  The skull began to bob agitatedly. ‘Locus hic.’

  Gorgias was over twenty metres up. Spinoza reached for the controls of the nearest elevator, patched into them, and the wall-mounted tracker flickered into life. She stepped onto the platform and shuddered up the wall’s face on rack-and-pinion tracks. She reached Gorgias’ position and stared at another blank section of wall. It was exactly as the others had been, and marked with the UV seal to boot.

  ‘This is cleared,’ she said.

  ‘Blindness! Iterum.’

  Spinoza fixed on the UV seal, and pushed it through the full spectrum of visual checks. It came out identically to all others – until the last one. Spectral analysis brought up a different profile. It looked the same, had the same credentials, but the ink was chemically different.

  Gorgias had started butting into the wall-panel where it hovered, then moving upwards and trying again. Carefully, Spinoza began to move along the elevator platform, testing at the edges. The panel was just like the rest – twenty metres wide, ten tall, with grooves to take the edges of slotted container units. When the arbitrators had been here, it would have been pressed right up against the side of one of them, buried under the mountains of cargo.

  Her auspex readings showed nothing. Everything reflected back, giving her nothing. Frustrated, she pushed hard against the panel. It didn’t move, but there was a faintly audible click from the far side. Spinoza looked at Gorgias, who looked back.

  ‘Move away,’ she warned, bringing out her crozius and activating the energy field. Argent snarled, throwing illumination up the gloomy walls. Bracing herself, Spinoza brought it up to the join running along the top of the panel, gripped the maul two-handed, and pressed it into the structure.

  Energies flared up instantly, scattering against the steel. The panel-edge resisted for a few seconds before the extreme heat started to tell. It cracked, blistered, then blew. Spinoza almost stumbled as the entire fascia swung inwards, triggered by the destruction of its locking brace. Argent’s energy field flooded light into the space beyond the casing.

  Spinoza remained static for a second, startled. They should have been staring into the solid innards of the brace-wall, but instead a whole new chamber had opened up before them. The walls, the floor, the ceiling – all were thick with blood. The stains were old, dried a dark red-brown but dyed deep into the metal as if fired in an oven. There were other marks on the walls: gouges, as if energy claws had ripped through the outer skin, and burn-marks, and the glimmer of what looked like spatters of acidic residue.

  ‘Foulness,’ hissed Gorgias, swirling around inside, its picter-lens clicking rapidly. ‘Hereticus-majoris-extremis.’

  The space stank like nothing Spinoza had ever encountered. Some of it was the blood, locked in its sealed unit for a long time, but that was not all. There was something indescribably disgusting in the stagnant air, something that made her want to gag. Saliva pooled in her cheeks, and she swallowed it down.

  ‘What was in here?’ she asked, half speaking to Gorgias, half to herself. The chamber was empty, but her esoteric scanners were now running off the scale. They would require analysis – nothing in them made any kind of sense.

  Then she saw the red light, blinking on, off, on, off, down in the corner of the chamber. She knelt down, bringing her head closer and switching off the auspex overlays.

  A tripwire beacon, rigged to the blown door-lock, now transmitting.

  Spinoza turned on her heel and jogged back to the elevator platform controls.

  ‘Aneela,’ she voxed, keeping Argent activated as the platform began to grind down to deck-level. ‘Prep for immediate dispatch, inform the Lord Crowl, and ready arms – we are discovered.’

  Crowl took his time, peering into the convex pict-screen, watching the phosphor runes scroll past in blurry sequence. The lists of manifests, routing stations, warp stages were all routine, nothing that would arouse the suspicion of even the most exacting of assessors. No doubt the arbitrators had been all over this already, but you never knew. They might have boarded a hundred vessels before this one, and even psycho-conditioned scrutineers could feel fatigue.

  He could sense Arjanda hovering at his shoulder, breathing heavily, padding back and forth, trying not to let his agitation become too obvious. The captain was very scared. His crew were very scared. That was to be expected. Once he might have put that down as a marker of some kind of guilt, but he’d long since learned the truth of what he had already told Spinoza – everyone was scared of an inquisitor, the criminal and the innocent alike, which made their job harder, not easier. Spinoza didn’t seem to have fully grasped that truth yet, but it was to be hoped that she would do, in time.

  His thoughts strayed to his new acolyte, and for an instant the ranks of ship-data swam out of focus. He remembered first discussing her with Revus, months ago. The data on her had been hard to get hold of, but Huk had been creative in her enquiries. They had all worked hard for him, the bloodline, and that was some small comfort in a world of disappointments.

  Should his conscience have been pricked a little more? Maybe, maybe not. He had been languishing in a moral void for so long that recollecting old decencies came harder than ever. Still, for all Tur’s influence lay heavy on her still, there were promising signs.

  ‘Can I be of any assistance, inquisitor?’ came Arjanda’s querulous voice.

  Crowl turned the dial over to the next screen, never taking his eyes off the grease-streaked glass. More runes flickered, line after line of them.

  ‘How long was your delay off Luna?’ he asked, casually.

  ‘Two days,’ said Arjanda.

  ‘It took two days?’ asked Crowl, finally looking up at the captain.

  Arjanda shrugged, a weak affectation of levity. ‘I did not tell them their business.’

  Crowl returned the console. ‘Here, now. I’ve looked at your internal records of movement within the solar system. It’s just as you say, but now I find something unusual – perhaps you can help me. Your augur records show close tracking of another vessel at local time/date marker 456-56-13. This vessel’s location I can extrapolate from the augur logs as somewhere out in void sector 4569, a long way beyond Luna. And yet the location of the Rhadamanthys on that same time/date marker, according to your own location recorder, puts you within five thousand kilometres of the Luna holding shipyard Chraeses. So either your augur range is incredibly long, or one of these two records is mistaken. Which is it?’

  Crowl looked up to see Arjanda visibly shaking. That was not terribly unusual. What was more unusual was that the captain-general was holding a pistol two-handed, pointing it at Crowl’s head. Sweat was now pouring freely down the man’s face, making his elaborate moustache slick where it met his puckered flesh.

  The rest of the sentient crew had also drawn their firearms – mostly shotguns and obsolete-format lasguns, the kind of thing you’d expect a freighter crew to use.

  ‘Throne, I wish you had not come here,’ said Arjanda, looking as if he might burst into panicked tears. ‘Do you think I want to do this? Do you think I want to damn myself?’

  Crowl pondered how to react. His fingers were inconveniently far from Sanguine, but it was not the weaponry that concerned him so much as the fact they were daring to deploy it at all.

  ‘You realise what you’re doing?’ Crowl asked, quietly.

  ‘Damn you, yes I do!’ shrieked Arjanda, trying to control his shaking arms. ‘Whoever you sent down into my hold has just tripped a proximity beam, and I can’t let you go now. Any of you. They’ll find me, you understand this?
They’ll find me, and he will find me, and I can’t… I won’t…’ The muzzle was trembling now, rocking back and forth as the man’s muscles tightened. ‘I’ll die first! I’ll die first. Nothing you can do to me would be worse. Nothing.’

  Crowl looked past the gun’s barrel at the tortured face beyond. ‘You’re a good man, are you not, captain-general? You love the Imperium. I can sense it, but you’ve become part of something that scares you. You should give me some names now, for in your situation that is a kind of heroism.’

  Arjanda started laughing. His shoulders rose and fell, rocking with the bitter peals. ‘I don’t care! If you’d seen what I’ve… Holy Throne, I am damned to purgation anyway, and we are all damned to purgation, and you are too, so what does it matter that–’

  Crowl had waited patiently for the moment, silently glanding a burst of motovine. When he moved, the stimulant kicked in, reacting to the interface chemicals in his armour and making his movements blistering. He swept Sanguine out of its holster and loosed a bullet into Arjanda’s shoulder, sending the man tumbling to the deck even before he noticed the acceleration. While the captain roared in pain, Crowl got to work on the crew, ducking under the panicked shotgun discharges and punching out with his armoured fist. Two of them rushed him, firing wildly. He swerved around the bullet-lines and crunched his fist into a face, then jabbed an elbow back into an exposed neck.

  Then the rest were running, scrabbling for the rear doors. Crowl caught one of them by the neck and slammed him down onto the deck, breaking his back. Sanguine accounted for another – a single shot through the back of a head, an explosion of blood and a scatter of falling bone fragments.

  He swirled around, his black armour glinting, and faced the rest of them. Cut off from escape, their terrified hands now clutched at their weapons again, and they backed away, trying to get an angle to fire. Crowl gave them no opportunity – the motovine made him terrifyingly fast, and he leapt into the air, his armour’s systems boosting him, reloading as he flew.

  He crashed into the last knot of them, kicking out to crush the sternum of the closest, grabbing the hair of another and smashing his face into the cogitator bank, firing with ruthless precision to end another two. He tore apart the remainder like a vengeful spectre of the Old Dark, his cloak twisting around him as he moved, ending the screams one by one with heavy, punishing strokes. The very last of them tried to run, to leap down at the sloping armourglass viewportals as if he could somehow shatter them and tumble into the void, but Crowl caught him, hauled him back, seized his head and neck in an armlock, and twisted. The sick crack echoed around the bridge, followed by the thud of the broken body hitting the deck.

  Once done, Crowl took a breath. The blood drained slowly down over the cracked bridge stations. Only the servitors still worked on, slaved to their terminals, their slack-jawed expressions never altering.

  Crowl looked Sanguine over, brushed the ivory clean, reloaded it, and moved over to where Arjanda still writhed in pain. He crouched over the prone captain, placed a balled fist on the man’s wound, then pressed down.

  ‘Say nothing, listen with utmost care,’ Crowl told him in a low voice. ‘You are condemned to die, you know this, but it can yet be painless. Your name need not be entered into the rolls of the damned. You have family? They need not suffer. I can take you from this place, protect you. Work with me, and it can be a good death.’

  Arjanda began to laugh, and bubbles of foam spilled from his agonised mouth. ‘Even if I… believed you…’ he blurted, wincing from the web of pain.

  His eyes went bloodshot, and his body began to twitch. Crowl pulled back, watching the captain’s face turn purple. His gunshot had not caused that level of damage – the captain had ingested something to end his suffering. That, above all other compromises he had made, was detestable.

  ‘A name,’ said Crowl, gazing down at the jerking body. ‘Just give me a name.’

  Arjanda managed a final, contorted expression of regret. ‘He’ll know. Even on… the other side. He’ll know.’

  And then he gasped up a slug of vomit, arched his back, veins stiffly protruding, and messily died. As his body finally went limp, something clanked against the metal. Crowl saw the captain-general’s cane rolling across the deck. He reached for it, and noticed that clustered jewels at its tip were flashing softly, just like a transmitter.

  Then the bridge lumens suddenly plunged into a cloudy red, klaxons went off, and the pict-screens began to flash up warnings.

  Crowl moved towards the nearest monitor, pulled up a diagnostic readout, and saw just how long the freshly overloaded plasma drives had before they blew the ship apart.

  He shot the dead Arjanda a withering look.

  ‘You contemptible bastard,’ he said.

  Spinoza sprinted up the corridor, feeling the decking flex under her boots. The walls were shaking down, and rivets slammed out of their housings like bullets. One winged Gorgias, sending the skull crashing into the far wall and blurting out confused High Gothic curses.

  ‘Lord Crowl!’ she voxed again, more urgently this time. Aneela hadn’t been able to raise him, and the ship was coming apart. From somewhere a long way off, a dull rumble gathered pace, vibrating up the deep shafts to the enginarium and sounding like a distant roar of massed bovine herds. It would only get worse – she’d seen a plasma breach on a major freighter before, and what was left of the hull didn’t leave much for the salvage teams.

  She reached an intersection and swung around the corner, running hard, feeling the air heat up behind her. The vibrations underfoot became more severe, cracking the pressed-metal decking and sending hairline fractures snaking up the walls.

  When she finally reached the bridge level, the entire structure around her started to sway, and lumen-units blew apart in showers of plastek. The doors were closed and locked, so she swung Argent heavily into the join, crunching through the bolstered ironwork and searing it with disruptor-flares. Three more swings smashed the left-hand panel back onto its hinges, and she shoved it aside and broke in.

  Bodies lay all across the deck, slumped across terminals and thrown down into servitor pits. Much of the roof had already collapsed, and hung in a tangle of girders from a disintegrating dome-ceiling. Cogitators were destructing in sequence, gibbering wildly out of control and then exploding in gouts of black smoke. Amid it all was Crowl, hunched over a still-functioning terminal and clattering intently on a runeboard.

  ‘Lord Crowl!’ Spinoza shouted, racing over to him. ‘The ship is primed to annihilate! We must leave now!’

  ‘A moment, Spinoza,’ Crowl said, never taking his eyes from the screen.

  Spinoza stared at him for a moment. More echoing cracks resounded from the decks below, building up to the crescendo that would finally compromise the ship’s immense substructure.

  She hastened over to the bridge’s prow, above where the decking sloped sharply towards the single line of armourglass real-viewers. ‘Aneela,’ she voxed. ‘Report position and status.’

  Nothing but static hissed over the comm-link. The energies boiling away in such close proximity had blown what remained of her receptive range.

  ‘Lord, we have to–’

  ‘A moment.’

  An explosion burst out from behind the broken doors, sending both tumbling through the air. The far end of the bridge decking rumpled up like thrown cloth, exposing a gaping void beneath, soon filled with the rush of kindling fires. The roar from below ramped up in volume and proximity, tracing a path of destruction from the deeps up to their level. Only seconds remained.

  Spitting a curse under her breath, Spinoza seized two micro-krak grenades, primed them and hurled them at the armourglass panes below. Then she stowed her crozius, strode over to her master and prepared to physically haul him from the terminal. By the time she reached him he was finally moving, reaching for his mag-locked helm and twisting it into place.<
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  ‘You look agitated, Spinoza,’ he said, just as another blast rocked the rear wall, bulging it into a lattice of cracks and provoking secondary fireballs all down the right flank of the bridge-space.

  ‘Now, lord,’ she insisted, pulling him towards the downward slope. The micro-krak charges went off in sequence, smashing the armourglass into a welter of fire-flecked shards. The bridge’s atmosphere immediately blew out of the breach, hurling both of them down the slope, through the glass and the curtains of guttering flames, and out into the void beyond.

  Even helmed and armoured, the shock was terrible. Spinoza felt herself spinning wildly, lost in a whirl of limbs and stars. For all that her armour attempted to compensate, the sudden plunge into frigidity took her breath away, and she felt her heart racing. For a moment, as the debris wheeled past her and her sound-world disappeared into a claustrophobic drumbeat of snatched breaths, she could latch on to nothing at all – just circling stars and a sensation of horrific dislocation.

  Then the snow-grey arc of Terra’s horizon swam up across her visual field, followed by the immense shadow of the burning Rhadamanthys. She saw Crowl, barely visible in his black armour, sail past her, arms outstretched as if to catch something.

  The Spiderwidow loomed up out of the void below them right on schedule, its crew-bay doors open and its thrusters jetting expertly to gather them up. Crowl went in first, before Aneela brought the gunship around to capture Spinoza.

  The interrogator hit the far side of the crew-bay at speed, bouncing from the impact and nearly cartwheeling back out into the void. Crowl, already shackled in place, grabbed her as she sailed past, pulled her upright and shoved her unceremoniously into a restraint harness. Gorgias, propelled by its own thrusters, shot into the narrow compartment just as Aneela closed the outer doors and swung the gunship around. Pumped air began to siphon in, restoring the growl of engine noise and the crash of impacting debris.

  ‘That was too close, lord,’ she chided, strapping herself down, furious at the needless delay.