The Relentless Dead, page 29
Except in this case it was not the ship that screamed, it was the material world around it. The very atoms rent apart, bleeding indescribable colours.
Dravura Morkath watched through the crystal windows as the vessel she had tamed for her master spilled forth into realspace.
The sudden shock of translation hit the bridge crew, already overtaxed in serving the ancient vessel. Beastmen vomited. One opened its mouth and bit down on its own arm hard enough to fracture it.
A Mechanicum adept at a fire-control station suffered a compounding error in his synthetic brain. His logic chains – rerouted so drastically to make sense of the pandemonium of the Eye – jammed as it encountered the silent order of realspace.
He collapsed to the deck, the smoke of frying neural circuits wafting from his tear-ducts.
Morkath saw his thoughts as he died, his stream of consciousness surrounding his augmented cranium like the halo on the fresco of an Imperial saint.
All beings thought differently. Some of the beastmen on the bridge projected impressionistic swirls of ink around their heads, full of despair. Others expressed their conscious with jagged-edged panic.
This adept, in his death throes, still thought in the blinking typeface of a cathode screen as his brain ticked down like a dying chrono.
Back to station. I can get back to station, lord. I can…
Pain, so much…
Do I live?
I can…
…still…
…serve…
‘Children of the Eye,’ growled a voice behind her. ‘Not meant for realspace.’
Morkath turned to look upon her Warmaster, ensuring her mind did not search the cloud of thoughts swirling around him like an aura of flame. Her master did not always want her to see what resided there, and neither did she.
Morkath bowed to her lord.
Abaddon. The Warmaster of Chaos, right hand of Horus, Master of the Black Legion and the being fated to kill the False Emperor. The man who had pulled Morkath out of the dark as a child, and made her what she was – though what that was, exactly, remained a subject of whispers.
The Warmaster sat in an ebony throne too large for his enormous frame. What manner of creature required such a seat – one large enough to dwarf the Warmaster, even in his battle plate – was, like so much aboard the Blackstone Fortress Will of Eternity, beyond Morkath’s understanding.
Yet the space around the Warmaster was not empty. Daemon-things flitted there, darting and howling. Folding in upon themselves in geometric shapes or bursting into flames that devoured their essence as some stray emotion set them ablaze.
Morkath closed her eyes and willed herself not to see the motes of warp-things. To screen them out, and see only the revered face of the being she was lucky to call father.
‘The stars are different this time,’ he said.
‘Different, my lord?’ Morkath asked, opening her eyes to see the Warmaster without his shroud of parasitic spirits.
‘I remember.’ Abaddon’s head, twice as large as that of a mortal, did not regard her as he spoke, yet even so, the low rumble of his voice rattled through her. ‘I recall how the stars looked when we exited the Eye last time.’
‘During the Gothic War,’ Morkath said.
‘Yes, before we took you in, foundling. I remember where every star was fixed, then. It was the same. The same constellations, unchanging from the first time we exited the Eye to the last. Twelve times, the same starscape.’
‘But now they have changed?’
‘New stars,’ growled Abaddon. ‘Different stars. Moving… a fleet.’
‘Contacts! Contacts!’ bleated a Mechanicum sensory officer. She stood permanently wired into a pit, slick organic cables – bunching and relaxing like the tentacles of an undersea octopod – connecting her exposed cranium with eight psykers floating in fluid sacs. ‘Imperial fleet! Bearing eight-two-six. Two thousand five hundred miles distance. Emperor class! Mars class! Vengeance class!’
‘Reading ship silhouettes,’ intoned Cacadius Siron. He was a former Alpha Legionnaire – now Abaddon’s intelligence chief. Before him, projection lasers danced in the air, sketching wire-frame outlines of Imperial vessels. ‘Tentative identifications: Might of the Faithful, Emperor class. Final Blow, Mars class. Duke Lurstophan, Dauntless class. Abridal’s Glory, Gothic class. They are from multiple battlefleets – Scarus, Agrippina, Corona.’
‘A combined fleet,’ said Abaddon. ‘Consolidated due to casualties.’
‘Our opening moves must have damaged their fleet assets even more heavily than we estimated,’ Morkath said.
‘With the remnants split chasing the Vengeful Spirit away from Cadia,’ added Siron. He seemed ready to speak again, but the Warmaster cut him off.
‘Meaning, the Gate is open.’
‘To Cadia!’ roared a beastman, raising its clenched fists. Across the command deck, crew howled, crowed, bellowed, gurgled, ululated. A thousand mutant throats screaming the elation that came with an achievement millennia in the making. Feet and hooves stamped the decking. ‘To Cadia! To Cadia!’
Under the noise, only Morkath heard the Warmaster growl.
‘A step,’ he said. ‘It is only a step. The Crimson Path awaits.’
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Steve Lyons, The Relentless Dead
