The Emperor's Gift

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  I tried to visualise what he was saying. Surely that amount of control over a warship’s journey was unprecedented. A Navigator was a guide, a pilot through the warp, not an overseer of every single system. He couldn’t have been acting alone in the vessel’s damnation.

  +Your skills will be missed when the Grand Master sends you to Mars.+

  Malchadiel nodded to the justicar’s compliment. His desire to train under the guidance of the Martian Mechanicus was no secret to any of us. Had Castian been able to spare him, he’d already be gone – a handful of years into his shrouded training as a Techmarine.

  ‘The machine-spirit is dead,’ he said. ‘Wholly dead. The core cannot be reawakened to full function, short of reconsecration in a soul forge. This ship wasn’t simply shut down.’ Malchadiel shook his head. ‘They sought to kill it, to rip the life from every system.’

  ‘The enginarium chambers are playing host to a warzone’s worth of bloodstains and solid round impacts,’ I added. ‘Whatever battles raged through the ship’s bowels, the crew preferred to break back into material space aboard a slain hulk, rather than remain in the warp. When we leave, we need to scuttle the ship. There can be no purification. Its ashes must be consigned to the void.’

  +And no systems can be restored while we’re aboard? Not even artificial gravity?+

  Malchadiel hesitated. I could sense him remembering the damage in the enginarium. Images of the devastation skittered across his mind’s eye, fleeting and cold.

  ‘I can resurrect several minor systems, justicar. They will be slaved to temperamental auxiliary cogitators, though. Without a machine-spirit to control them, it’s a temporary rebirth at best. The ship is slain,’ he finished. ‘She was cut to her core.’

  +And the warp-cry?+

  I shook my head. ‘It seems sourceless, justicar.’

  ‘Echoes, perhaps,’ Dumenidon suggested. ‘The lingering resonance of great emotional trauma. The archives are full of such tidings. I have felt it myself on many missions.’

  ‘That seems likely,’ I said. ‘Still, there may be something hiding on board. I can’t be sure, either way.’

  Galeo nodded. +We will move to the enginarium and restore what we can, then press towards the ship’s prow and the Navigator’s occlusiam. Hyperion?+

  ‘Yes, justicar.’

  +Inform the inquisitor her presence will be not be possible for several hours at least.+

  ‘At once, justicar.’

  I did as he asked. The response I received was the one I’d expected. Inquisitor Annika Jarlsdottyr knew a great many curse words, and in that moment, she spat many of them freely into my mind.

  I tuned her out, returning my attention to the sending, drifting along the warship’s central spinal concourse.

  The walls still resisted me, affronted by the intrusion. Saturated by the dullest intelligence, the ship was poisoned through. It wanted to be left alone to grow ripe and corrupt, isolated in the void.

  I saw bodies hanging in the air, surrounded by the frozen organic displays of their own innards. I saw bodies stuck fast to the deck or the walls by bloodstains turned to thick ice. I saw bodies torn apart so that it became impossible to tell where one ended and another began, or which pieces had belonged to each corpse.

  More and more whispers snaked their way into my head. Each body I passed added to the sibilant sound, layering a fresh hiss upon the chanting melody.

  No no please the final concourse reload no God-Emperor no out of ammunition no no please for the Emperor failed the trials one more shot for myself the ship is screaming I can’t see mother mother I can’t breathe I’m blind where is it I can’t see no please no not me I can’t do it help me no no no help me my arm my arm no no

  +Return now, Hyperion. You’ve seen all there is to see.+

  I could taste bile in the back of my mouth. Perhaps Galeo was right. I started to say ‘As you command,’ but never finished the second word.

  He sensed it in the same moment I did. They all did. Each of them turned to me, alerted by our bond, sensing what I felt.

  ‘The enemy,’ Dumenidon growled. Weapons sparked into brighter life, charged by rising emotions.

  ‘No.’

  At that word, they all turned back to me. I blinked as my senses snapped back into the cradle of my skull, swaying but not falling as Malchadiel had done. The sending was complete at last. ‘Someone still lives, but they are not the enemy.’

  The threads of their life were thin enough to be masked the first time I sought them – and even the second time, I’d almost ghosted right past. The soul was nothing more than a candle in the cold.

  +Where?+ The question needled into me, as bladed as any weapon. Sometimes Galeo would forget his own psychic strength.

  I opened my eyes at last. ‘The starboard arming deck.’

  IV

  We moved quicker than before, drifting through the powerless decks, pulling ourselves along the ceiling and walls of the central spinal. Galeo led us with a sense of urgency we’d lacked since first boarding.

  At one point, the vox enjoyed a brief resurgence. The inquisitor made the most of it.

  ‘Hyperion, I command this mission,’ she was saying.

  ‘I know, inquisitor.’

  ‘I want pictographic evidence of all you witness, please. You cannot destroy an Imperial warship with nothing more than a sensor sweep to file in the evidence archives.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ I allowed, ‘but the testimonies of five Grey Knights will make for compelling authority, will they not?’

  She muttered something away from the vox-mic. Something about ‘overzealous bastards’.

  ‘Inquisitor?’

  Her grumbling tirade ended with the kind of sigh that suggested she was being as patient as could reasonably be expected.

  ‘I am not objecting to the cruiser’s destruction,’ she said. ‘I am saying I need to bring back more than your assurances that it had to be done. The ordo demands archivable evidence for an operation of this magnitude. As much as possible, especially when dealing with a warship wearing the Wolves’ colours.’

  She was breaking up again, stuttering as the vox grew choppy. I confess I found that to be a relief, but my training took precedence over comfort. As I dived through the nothingness, I reached back for her. It was no effort at all to make the connection, feeling her behind my eyes, letting her see what I saw.

  Blessedly, she chose to remain silent this time.

  We came to the end of a long corridor. I twisted in the air, shouldering aside a crate that immediately released a twinkling cloud of frozen autogun rounds, and kicked off from the wall. It put me ahead of the others as we glided down the adjacent hallway. Doors sliced past on either side, each bulkhead open, revealing brief glances of ruined serf dormitories, lesser armouries, storerooms, meditation chambers.

  ‘What did you sense?’ Malchadiel voxed to me. I felt him reaching for my mind, as if it were a puzzle to be unlocked, layer by layer. My surge of irritation battered his clumsy questing aside.

  ‘A soul,’ I told him, ‘bloodied and broken. The presence was indistinct, almost too weak to sense, or seeking to remain unfound.’

  ‘One of the crew?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Untainted?’

  I was less certain of that.

  +Weapons,+ Galeo ordered. +Be ready.+

  I reached for a bulky doorframe on the left side of the corridor, using my momentum to turn and swing through the open bay doors.

  The first thing I saw, by the light of my own eye lenses and the gleam from my weapon, was the arming chamber stretching out before me. Great cradles of blackened iron held the immense turrets of a weapons battery, facing out into the open void.

  On any other warship, this would have been a place of great industry and tremendous solemnity, as servitors and serfs made ready to wage war in the Emperor’s name. Here, it was a tomb.

  I felt the crawling sensation begin. A sick creep up the backbone; an itc
h behind the eyes. Taint. Filth. The enemy.

  At last, we’d found the Wolves.

  FIVE

  LONE WOLF

  I

  ‘Skitnah,’ she said behind my eyes.

  +No,+ I sent back. +He is untainted.+

  ‘I did not mean the survivor, Hyperion. I meant the dead.’

  My targeting reticule flashed across them all, body after body hanging in the air. Each one was a twisted marionette: limbs loose, war plate ruptured, backs broken.

  To arrest my headlong drift, I reactivated my mag-lock boots, thudding to the deck. Red diamonds shattered against my armour, breaking against my eye lenses. It took me a moment to realise that it was their blood. An ocean of blood, crystallised in the air.

  One of the Wolves, disturbed by my arrival, turned slowly as he drifted away. Oceanic grey ceramite marked with bronze runes reflected the glow of my weapon. When the warrior’s face rolled into view, I saw the damage to his helm – something had drilled its way through his eye lenses and into the skull beneath. His gauntlets were frozen at his throat, fingers locked into cold claws. He’d died trying to tear his helmet free. Seven of them floated there. A third of the ship’s Wolf population; traditionally, vessels this size were assigned to single squads.

  The deck vibrated as my brothers landed alongside me.

  ‘Blood of the Sigillite,’ Dumenidon breathed over the vox. The others looked at the desolation, waving blood-crystals away from their faceplates.

  I reached for another drifting Wolf to examine his injuries. The scream struck us the second my fingers connected with his armour.

  I’d been expecting something – the psychic echo of any soul expiring always left a trace – but this struck like a storm’s wind, hard enough to send me reeling. I saw Galeo in the corner of my vision, stumbling as I did. Several of the crew on board the Karabela cried out as a lesser echo grazed their receptive minds, travelling through my link to Annika.

  It was all I could do not to flee my body. Fire licked from my fingers, summoned without intent, burning without air. I could feel the same flames flaring in my eyes.

  +What… is… that…?+ Dumenidon’s strained voice reached me.

  And then it came. The words, a name, pealing in a voice of silent, psychic thunder.

  +DEVOURER+

  +OF+

  +STARS.+

  +Devourer of Stars!+ Dumenidon and Sothis cried out in sympathetic unity, as the sixth sense blastwave overpowered them both. It took all of my strength to resist shouting it aloud, as well.

  +A mortis-cry,+ confirmed Galeo. His voice was still shaken. +The last words of someone very powerful.+

  I said nothing at all. My senses ached in the mortis-cry’s wake. A weak telekinetic shove sent the ruptured body drifting away.

  +A psyker,+ I managed to send a few moments later, gesturing at the corpse. +One of their shamans.+

  Galeo nodded. I could hear him catching his breath in the scream’s wake. My ears rang; all sound was muted, as my mind echoed with prickling aftershocks.

  +Go with caution, Hyperion.+

  +Aye, justicar.+

  The survivor was the only body on the deck, while all others hovered in the silent airlessness.

  +He should be dead,+ sent Galeo as we drew near.

  +He almost is,+ I sent back. +And he will be soon.+

  He was a Wolf, armoured in the Chapter’s distinctive blue-grey ceramite, with a white wolf’s cloak draped over one shoulder. Blood marked his armour in visceral dappling. It marked his cloak. It marked his helm. It marked the decking all around him, glazed over into ice, and it marked the floor where both of his legs ended in hewn stumps at the knees. Ice had frosted him to the deck in a pool of his own blood. Through the shattered portholes, the Caul’s dust stretched on far beyond mortal sight.

  To look at him with human senses, I’d never have known he still lived. Even my retinal display read nothing of life within him. Only the infinitesimal thread of warmth from his psychic presence told a different tale.

  I approached first, kneeling down by him. Activated by proximity, runes cycled across my eye lenses as my armour sought to tune into his vox-channel. There was a click, and a pulse, and a long, ragged breath.

  I rolled him over, looking down into the cracked helm. Superficial damage, nothing a servitor would struggle to repair. But he didn’t acknowledge me. His bio-readings were barely above a flatline. Hibernation, then. It made sense. We’d need the correct balance of chemicals to revive him, back on the Karabela.

  ‘I sense no taint on him,’ Dumenidon said behind me.

  ‘There is none,’ I replied. ‘And he has triggered his sus-an membrane.’ +Inquisitor?+

  ‘Yes?’

  +We require the chemical compound Somnambulist, found in the south store racks in the Karabela’s apothecarion. Use a servitor in an environment suit to send it to us.+

  ‘No. I’m coming over myself.’ Somehow, I’d known she was going to say that.

  +It is not safe. We haven’t scouted the entire ship.+

  ‘Shut up, Hyperion.’

  +Hyperion is correct, inquisitor…+

  ‘Shut up, Malchadiel.’

  +Inquisitor…+

  ‘I am an inquisitor of the Ordo Malleus. Don’t argue with me. You will not win if I make it a contest of rank. I don’t need your permission for this. Can you move the wounded Wolf?’

  I looked over the body again. +Yes. Suspended animation will keep his wounds from worsening.+

  ‘Bring him to me. That’s an order.’

  II

  We met her in the hangar. Her own shuttle was a sleek counterpoint to the blunt aggression of our gunship, and I suspect none of us were surprised when she didn’t descend the gangramp alone, but with several other figures in full matt-black void-suits, each one marked with talismans of the Inquisition. A cyber-mastiff lingered close to one of them, utterly untroubled by the lack of gravity, its iron paws locked to the deck.

  ‘Two-Guns.’ One of the faceless black glass helms nodded over at me.

  ‘Hello, Hyperion,’ said the shortest, in a softly feminine voice.

  ‘We were bored,’ said another, the tallest. Even vox-crackle couldn’t hide Darford’s amused snort. He was a man easily amused by his own wit. I often wondered why.

  Inquisitor Jarlsdottyr walked over to us, somehow making a zero-gravity stomp seem graceful. She was clad in an environment suit, with her Cretacian bolter slung over her back. Her pale face stared out at us from the armoured helmet’s reinforced visor. Occasionally, the glass misted with her exhalations.

  Galeo was drawing breath to speak, but Annika lifted a finger in warning, silencing the justicar with her scowl. Behind her, the Khatan and Darford carried a crate of medical supplies.

  Annika crouched by the fallen Wolf we’d carried back with us.

  ‘Awaken him. He has a dirge to sing.’

  III

  The warrior’s first action upon waking was to grip my wrist with sudden and surprising strength. He said nothing – or rather, anything he did say was lost as his armour’s systems came back to life and sought to retune him into his squad’s uplink. With the automatic connection displaced, I made the gestures for seven numerals in succession: our communication frequency.

  A moment later, the vox crackled with a new link. His voice was a wet, burbling snarl, forced through clenched teeth.

  ‘Now I remember,’ he growled. ‘Bastards took my legs.’ He lifted his head, his eye lenses meeting mine. ‘Name yourself kindred or name yourself my foe, for I don’t recognise your armour.’

  It wasn’t an uncommon reaction, even among the Adeptus Astartes. Most Chapters believed our order to be a myth, if they’d heard of us at all. Few souls were allowed to remain aware of our existence.

  +Hyperion,+ Galeo pulsed. I nodded in understanding.

  ‘We are Castian, of the Grey Knights,’ I told the wounded warrior.

  For a wonder, he made his bloody right gauntlet into a fist,
and pounded it on his breastplate.

  ‘Grauvr, of Haken Ironchewer’s Great Company.’ He barked a laugh that carried nothing of mirth. ‘Though Ironchewer is as dead as I am. A new Wolf Lord will mean new markings. Hnngh. I’m glad to be dying. Too old to repaint my shoulder guard yet again.’

  I could hear the unwelcome wetness of blood in his breathing as he continued. ‘The Great Wolf, High Jarl Grimnar, told us of you. He sent us to find you. To Titan, he said. Sail to Saturn’s mightiest moon. Ha! I almost swore he lied to us. But you’re real, eh?’

  Each time he opened his mouth, I heard the wet thunder of his body’s organs struggling to push on.

  ‘You are far from Titan,’ I told him. ‘Fortune brought us here.’

  ‘Fortune? I piss on fortune. The Allfather brought you to me.’

  ‘The…?’

  ‘He means the Emperor,’ said Annika. She stepped ahead of us, crouching by the dying Wolf. ‘I am Annika Jarlsdottyr, now of the Inquisition and once of Fenris. My tribe was the Broken Tusk. My father was Ranil the Skinner, Jarl of Maulma. The warpaint we wore when we sailed to make murder was–’

  ‘The red of blood,’ wheezed the warrior, ‘painted from the mouth’s edges, down to the throat. Well do I know the Broken Tusk, girl. I have three centuries to my name within the Chapter, but I knew the Broken Tusk in the time before I was taken.’ He broke off, coughing wetly into his helm. ‘I was old when your grandsire sucked milk at your great-grandmare’s teats. You hear me, girl? I made murder on the cold seas and the shifting lands ten generations before you were even born.’

  She… She was actually smiling. Although I couldn’t see her face, I could feel her amusement; her warmth for this warrior. From her surface thoughts, I gleaned the Fenrisian tradition of good-natured boasting when fighters from different tribes crossed paths.

  A curious custom.

  ‘Tell us what happened,’ Annika pressed him, gripping his huge fist in both of hers. Her fingers didn’t even wrap his palm. ‘What brought you here?’