Tomb World, page 18
‘Why did you tell me this?’
Kamoteph shrugs, a complicated roll of his segmented spine. ‘I felt it was time for honesty between us. The cleansing of this world has not yet truly begun, and we have many more tasks to share.
‘And,’ he continues when Khemet does not reply, ‘because I mean what I say. I am just as invested in our success as you. The kemmeht of Qeretesh deserves to be rid of those who are unworthy to tread it. And for all your… deliberation, you are an able agent of that deliverance.’
The blade in Khemet’s hand hovers between them, useless. Lashing out at the cryptek will achieve nothing. Even displaying the weapon professes her weakness – threatening violence against a creature whose consciousness will immediately be claimed by the tomb world’s reanimation protocols is the very definition of impotence.
She needs time to process this. Her fraying cognition, which for so long she has kept under the tightest grip, is beginning to spiral, caught between the successive questions Kamoteph’s revelation raises. Her memories of awakening aboard the Senusret replay themselves, unbidden, and a fresh spike of alarm sends Khemet deeper into panic as she sees a tessellated floor swim into her sight.
Kamoteph takes a step back. ‘I sense that you would value some time in privacy, and I must attend to my duties.’
Khemet is incapable of preventing him from leaving. ‘Why me?’ she asks instead. ‘Why this world?’
Kamoteph releases another metallic chuckle. ‘Those, praetorian, are questions I suggest you put to our noble lord.’
CHAPTER 7
‘By the Throne…’
Sinos stands amid the wreckage of an Imperial army.
She and her squad have come directly from the Plakid Islands, or as directly as they were permitted. The first reports of the disaster sent Salvastari’s wardens into abject panic, bundling the lord-militant and his closest staff away to the secure interior of his palace. For almost the first time in her life, Sinos’ Adeptus Arbites seal could unlock no doors. She and her men had to wait for five interminable hours, under guard, before being allowed to board their flyer and begin their journey towards the voidport.
They dismounted seventeen hours later, turned out by a red-faced Munitorum junior who waved the transport on towards one of the laagers that had been set up across the plains. From there they have walked, in awe as much as horror, through the devastation of the landing fields.
The dead carpet the ground. This is grimly, literally true. Sinos and her squad stand in the middle of a path that has been cleared of bodies by the expedience of piling them to either side, leaving wide streaks of blood and flattened viscera through the grit and rubble. She can see Chimeras and civilian industrial units, all fitted with dozer blades, doing their work a mile to the north, carving another road through the bodies to permit the medicaes and fire-suppression teams to approach the ruins of the largest voidport on Orymous.
The flames still rage, almost a full day after the catastrophic detonation of Lifter 575-98. Sinos can feel the heat on her face even from this distance. Her mouth and nose are covered by a rebreather, and she is glad of it; even through its filters there is the rancid, chemical taste of promethium soot in the air.
After two miles of walking through the holding area for an armoured regiment, judging by the churned-up paving and tank treads crisscrossing the ground, they reach a built-up corner of the mustering site. The landing fields were – or had been – a sprawling complex of hab-blocks and mess halls and assembly squares, the equal of the barracks at which the troops had been stationed. Fire has spread from the voidport to many of the surrounding quarters, but this precinct has survived the destruction more or less unscathed.
They enter a tangle of low, dust-streaked habitation units, their road becoming congested with the living and the dead. A steady stream of flatbed transports is heading out laden with bodies, while other haulers wait impatiently to carry crews in towards the voidport. The world is quickly reduced to a cloud of ochre-yellow, close-packed bodies, and the angry cries of those who are trying to order the chaos.
When the forward motion of the crowd ahead stalls completely Sinos stops with it, weighing her next course. After twenty-four hours of continuous forward motion, Sinos has finally been forced to halt and consider the indefinite but powerful urge that has pulled her halfway around the globe.
She is an investigator, and the voidport is the scene of a most heinous crime. She must see it for herself.
‘This may be as far as we can go, marshal,’ says Abisode.
Sinos does not reply, and instead looks around. She finds her target quickly, and heads towards the entrance of a seven-storey hab-block.
‘Marshal–’ begins Abisode, but Sinos kicks down the door and starts to climb its steep staircase.
There are, fortunately, no bodies waiting for them. Sinos climbs quickly, hammering each boot into the bare metal steps. She heads to the highest level, clambering over kitbags and other gear that was evidently dropped in the panicked flight of whichever Guard unit was stationed here. She reaches the top, but finds the entry to the dormitory floor blocked by a three-level bedframe that has toppled over. Sinos throws it aside with more effort than required, making it clatter against others that have already fallen.
The hab-block is tall enough to give a clear overview over the clustered hab-stacks, parade grounds and thoroughfares. A tall, thin series of windows runs around the outer wall of the room, their crystalflex panes blown in by a pressure wave. Sinos climbs onto an abandoned foot locker, and for the first time sees the voidport.
The complex spreads for miles, a city in itself. Landing platforms and launch silos and control towers make a tessellated pattern of blocky shapes that waver in the heat haze. The outer wall of the closest silo has been broken open, and between the flames Sinos can see the corpse of a lifter, its hull plating splayed open. Broken rockcrete studded through with rebar shows where landing pads for flyers have shattered.
It is broken, entirely and completely. The Munitorum will need to tear it down to its foundations before they can rebuild. Towers have tumbled, machines have crashed. And everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there are the dead.
At the outskirts the primary cause of death had been the panicked fire of their fellow soldiers. During the drive in, Sinos had keyed her helmet’s vox-unit to a Munitorum command channel to listen to a briefing given by an anonymous adept to officials in Orylesti. Reports suggested that at least a dozen regimental-scale battles had broken out between neighbouring units as the devastation of the voidport unfolded. Those failures of discipline and command would require punishment at the highest level. Sinos does not expect to be involved; the Officio Logisticarum is more than equipped for military tribunals.
Closer in, the dead that form the verges of the approach road were not killed by las and hard rounds. They had had the life squeezed from them, caught up in the stampede that erupted when the first flames billowed from Landing Platform Sixty-Seven. In the tight alleys and prefabricated billets, even the most stalwart trooper had been forced along, slammed into corrugated steel walls. Those who fell from their comrades’ clutches were lost immediately, trampled underfoot by those who could themselves be dragged under just moments later.
Within the ruins of the voidport, it was fire and rock that had made such appalling murder. From her vantage point, between the dust and debris she can see blackened skeletons, their bones charred and reduced to powdery stumps. There are bodies cooked to red, ruined flesh. Some are fused together, melted like wax within the inferno’s heat. Even Sinos, who has seen much of war and the many, many ways a person can die, turns away from such sights.
Her descent through the hab-stack is slower. Her climb had been fuelled by haste, by desperation to see and to know. Now, Sinos feels the rage, cold and purposeful. This has always been her way, the core of her success as an arbitrator. She can take her fury and turn it into a tool.
As ever in moments of crisis, Sinos’ mind turns to action and evaluation. It will be at least a week before all the bodies are cleared from the embarkation fields, and a month before the last unfortunates are pulled from the ruin of the landing platforms. But before that, the living must be removed. The four million men and women of the Beathen Crusade are scattered across tens of miles in all directions. Encampments, such as the regiments might make while on campaign, are dotted about the plains where exhaustion led them to collapse in the hours after the destruction of the voidport. Logisticarum adepts have ordered Imperial Navy flights over the farthest units, dropping emergency rations and water from their bomb bays to see them through the days to come.
The act of moving an Imperial army, even in the simplest of circumstances, is an act of staggering complexity. Re-forming this one, which is leaderless and in complete disarray, will demand as much effort as winning the war the regiments had been formed to fight.
But that is not her duty. Sinos is here to determine what, in the name of Holy Terra, caused this to happen.
‘Marshal! Marshal Sinos!’
As she emerges from the hab-unit, Sinos is stunned to find Selimha Briseida sitting on the rear of a cargo-8. Her squad form up protectively, but Sinos waves their shotguns down.
‘Stop the truck,’ calls Briseida, her voice hoarse.
The cargo-8 pulls out of the line and wheezes to a stop. The logisticator climbs down, stumbling until one of Sinos’ squad catches her. Her face is smeared with ash, through which tears have cut clean runnels on her dark-brown skin. Her robe is a frayed ruin at its edge, showing where it has caught on shards of rebar and debris.
Her retinue are little better, climbing down after their mistress. They have no wounds, but their Munitorum livery is cloaked with ash and blood.
‘I am pleased to see you, adept.’ Sinos had assumed that Briseida had died with Cullen.
‘I had to see for myself.’ Her voice quavers. The strong, belligerent woman Sinos had met not three days earlier, who had argued toe-to-toe with a general of the Astra Militarum, is gone.
‘I was up… up on the orbital.’ She is not speaking to Sinos, but at her, her reserve undone by a familiar face. ‘The general had me go up early, to take charge of the final provisioning. But I… I had to come back. I had to see.’
‘So did I, adept.’
‘I saw them, Sinos. I carried them in my arms. I pulled them from the rubble with my hands…’ Briseida stumbles forwards, grabbing hold of Sinos with thin fingers.
‘Find them, marshal. Find them, and burn them for their heresy.’
Sinos gently but firmly takes the logisticator’s hands in hers, and prises them from the collar of her armour. As the old woman is racked by sobs, one of her aides steers her away into the safety of the knot of adepts.
That is Sinos’ role. It is why she was called to Orymous. There can be no question now of malicious intent, no concealment behind material fatigue or operator error or any of the other benign explanations that could be offered for the misfortunes that have befallen the mustering world. The destruction of the voidport is an overt attack, explicable only as an act of sabotage. There is an agent, an actor behind this campaign. And now they have shown their hand.
Whoever orchestrated this will not stop now, of that Sinos is sure. This is an escalation that takes them out of the shadows, throwing off the cloak of plausible, if improbable, adversity.
It is, in a macabre way, freeing. She is no longer groping for explanations in the dark. She is in pursuit of an enemy that is cunning, resourceful and ruthless.
Now, Sinos can hunt.
CHAPTER 8
All wisdom tells Khemet to walk away. All self-preservation tells her that she must seek solitude. She should master herself, should set her mind back to a state of equilibrium.
But wisdom and self-preservation are not in command of her limbs. Anger is.
She finds Hekasun in the throne room of Qeretesh. It is where he is always to be found, save for his forays into the world’s treasuries to rifle through their wares. Hekasun has not once walked upon the surface of this world since he came to it. He has not stood beneath its sun, nor seen the petty works its vandals have erected. He has not bled its occupiers, nor greeted his awoken cohorts from their crypts. He has never truly listened to Khemet when she has explained her strategy to him. He has simply waited, arrogant and imperious, for her to deliver Qeretesh to his petulantly out-thrust hands.
The throne room is among the deepest halls of the tomb world, sunk far into the planet’s mantle. Here, at least, is an echo of the glory of the necrontyr – even a pauper house like the Zathanor would not skimp on the grandeur of its principal palace.
It is fifty khet wide, sufficient for an entire legion to array itself across its blackstone floor. Massive pillars run in rows, each face cut to geometric precision and inlaid with power conduits that glow with immense energy. The walls, far to the distance on either side of Khemet’s periphery, are made of a translucent crystal that permits the throne room’s occupants to see the roiling molten rock of their world. It bathes the chamber in a warm, fuliginous glow, proximate in tone to Hekasun’s reactor core.
At its centre is a ziggurat, the equal of any that once crowned the planet’s surface. Within, Khemet knows, will be the heart of the tomb world’s spirit, along with the greatest of all its treasures – the command protocols for the legions that slumber in its vaults.
He has his court with him. It has swollen from the few who had accompanied him aboard the Senusret as the lordling has rummaged through the dynastic vaults. Hekasun’s vanity demands witnesses, though none, she notices, sits within the chain of succession of the Zathanor. Of course, that line was broken – by her – but Hekasun has purposefully awoken none who might come forward to challenge his claim to dominion of Qeretesh.
‘Hekasun. I would speak with you.’
She announces herself while she is several leagues away, but takes to the air once she has his attention. Drifting upon a haze of anti-gravity, she rises to be level with the ziggurat’s peak, from which Hekasun plays nomarch.
‘Praetorian,’ he says in sly welcome. ‘Kamoteph tells me you and he have talked.’ There is mockery in his voice, but there is anger too. Perhaps he is vexed by Kamoteph giving Khemet the truth; she cannot say.
‘I demand answers.’
‘Demand? You should greet your liberator with more deference.’
‘I owe you nothing.’
‘You owe me everything!’ Hekasun roars. He leaps from his throne with a display of such visceral anger that Khemet checks, uncertain from where he has found such passion. ‘You owe your existence to me! Had I not released you from your prison, your mind would have collapsed into oblivion. I spared you from the fate you deserve.’
‘You desire that I show you gratitude? That I fall upon my knees and praise you?’
‘No, Khemet. I wish for you to give back the worlds you stole from us.’
Genuine curiosity stops her from barking back a reply. ‘What worlds?’ she asks instead.
‘Do you wish to know? Do you wish to behold who it is you have served all this time?’
With an electronic grunt of effort, Hekasun reshapes his form. The necrodermis of his chestplate flows and shifts. The glyph of the Traveller, emblazoned on Hekasun’s torso, fades, receding into his metal.
Around her, all are following Hekasun’s lead. Shudders of rippling metal echo around the chamber as the nobles cast off their false allegiance to the Traveller. Across torsos and brows emerges an icon that Khemet recognises instantly. A glyph dredged from her memory, lit by the blaze of her staff of office as she renders necron after necron to slag and ash.
She turns back to watch the dynastic seal of the Zathanor emerge from Hekasun’s chest.
‘Yes, duatekh.’ Hekasun draws out the insult. ‘The house you dissolved on a whim to buy your way into the esteem of the Traveller. It seems you did not kill us all.’
Menouthis. In an instant Khemet travels back across centuries and light years to the last world of the Zathanor, until Hekasun brought her to Qeretesh.
‘They had not survived the Great Sleep,’ she says slowly. ‘They were mad. Raving. My duty was clear.’
Barks of anger and denunciation echo around her, none louder than Hekasun’s.
‘Do not speak to me of duty, praetorian.’ He hisses Khemet’s title as a curse. ‘It was not duty that led you to slay every member of my family. To murder all that was left of my dynasty. You massacred them to curry favour with the overlord. They were the coin you used to buy your way into his affections.’ His fury twists into mocking scorn. ‘Such, as you have learnt, that they are.’
‘You are wrong,’ she throws back, matching anger with anger. ‘That is the lie you have told yourself, nursing your plans for vengeance. You have conjured me as the object of your hate because you cannot face the truth. The Zathanor were doomed by their poverty from the moment they walked into their coffins.’
That is what Khemet tells herself. But there is a fraction of doubt, a slim and treacherous fragment of uncertainty that worms its way out of the recesses of her mind.
Did she end the Zathanor out of spite? Was that her motive? She remembers it, a labour of weeks, as each dynast was pulled from their crypts by their own lychguard and dragged before her. They died poorly, thrashing, screaming, babbling nonsense from broken minds. There was nothing vindictive or self-interested in it. That the Traveller arrived as her grim work was completed was a matter of coincidence.
But these are the facts she tells herself, in the present. They are not the truth of perfect, engrammatic recall. She fears to dredge too deeply, to risk losing herself in the past.
