The Lords of Silence Read online

  But it is only a hesitation – a momentary failure, for they are a good crew, one into which Vorx has poured all his long benevolence and careful acumen.

  ‘By your will, lord,’ says Hovik. She turns Solace to intercept, her grey eyes dull to fear.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Rhoe Twe is stumbling, for the deck is lurching around heavily and her legs are buckled and lesioned. Death has been pawing at her shoulder for a long time. She is not overly concerned about her increasingly difficult life ending, but there is always duty enough to keep her on her feet, and she does care about that.

  She was born on this ship. She knows no other existence but that of its clammy corridors and its slopping decks. Her eyes are milky white, her skin like translucent parchment. She is perfectly adapted to the dark, to the slightly higher than standard gravity, to the heat and the moisture. She reaches out to grab on to pipework, steadying herself. She knows where every rivet and piston-head is, and treads around the obstacles surely.

  This is mostly instinct, now. You can’t learn Solace’s layout in the normal way, for it changes all the time. Bulkheads shift, enginarium components move. Some sections are becoming heavily organic, pulsing and perspiring in the dark, whereas others clang with unusual internal noises. Every time Rhoe Twe removes a casing, she does not know what she will see – a nest of bloatworms writhing amid the valves, a pair of proto-lungs shivering as they suck up engine oil, or perhaps just bare metal, clicking over as it should.

  That is why she is the Cultivator, as much a custodian of living things as inert materials. One day, far into the future, the entire ship will be a single amorphous organism. She is helping to make this a reality, to coax and to nurture. It is hard work, back-breaking and relentless, but it gives her a certain measure of pride. She has sons and daughters growing up in the lower decks, already learning to grasp a ratchet and siphon a fuel sump. If they survive the mutations and the plagues, one of them might one day become Cultivator. And if they are blessed with fertility, in centuries to come one of their progeny might be there, on that mystical and long-awaited day when Solace speaks for the first time, not in hisses of steam or scrapes of iron but in a real voice with real words.

  Rhoe Twe moves off again, a welder gun in one hand, the other pushing against the grease-slick walls. A brace of lifter-servitors chunters along behind her, their bulky frames grating up against the mesh roof of the narrow ways. Weak lights glow and flare in the heavy dark, exposing caked-on grime and curdled run-off.

  Vorx is asking a lot of her, but then he always does. The plasma drives are dangerously hot, their enormous chambers shaking with a haze of racing pre-burners. She has seen conduits give out, filling entire sub-levels with poison gas. Now it is the main isolator unit, the gangle of valves and pressure pumps that switches motive power from the warp drives to the plasma drives. Something has collapsed within the main tower, and so she hurries to clamp it down. This takes her a long way from the enginarium control, down under a row of big plasma conduits, tubes the diameter of a hab-unit that shoot under reinforced deck-plates for five hundred metres. She can hear the contents swill and boom within the pocked enclosure, yearning to burst out and drench them all in a tide of flesh-melting corrosiveness.

  What will be, will be, she muses, humming a merry prayer to the god while fighting her way down the narrowing capillary route.

  It is then that she sees the shape, a long way down, half-hidden behind a screen of pressed-metal gantries and criss-crossed struts. The air is thicker down there, made into a backlit swamp of sick green, so that the colossal engine components around them are black silhouettes over a churning chasm.

  It is a walkway, slung perilously between the convex outlines of big support piles. Something moves across it, half-visible in the drifting smog. An Unbroken, surely – too huge to be anything else. Maybe huger than that, even – a Kardainn, bulked up by all that overlapping plate.

  Rhoe Twe crouches for a moment, unsure what to do. The servitors behind her clatter to a halt. Surely the Unbroken will detect her, but perhaps the din from the drives is too much. Or perhaps he is off on his own mission, displaying all that single-minded resolve that they do so well, oblivious to anything around him that poses no threat.

  The mists clear for a moment, blown into tatters by the belch from a brass valve-head, and she sees things a little more clearly. Yes, it is the Lord Garstag, heading down to where the warp drive foundations are turbo-bolted into the underpinnings of the enginarium zone. What can he be doing there, she wonders. What could bring him down to this place while there is fighting to be done?

  But then the miasma closes again, wafted by powerful currents from below. Up ahead, she hears the first harsh rattle from the innards of the isolator tower. It sounds like a major component has come loose, rattling around its housing and threatening to break out.

  She glances down again and sees nothing. He is gone. Perhaps he was never there at all – Solace does send phantasms from time to time, especially when the mind is oppressed or preoccupied.

  So she presses on, panting and sweating, her servitors in tow. She must remember to inform the Lord Vorx about this, when time allows.

  But there are things to do while the ship is fighting. So many things to do.

  Hovik does as she is asked. That is impressive, for this manoeuvre must look to her like suicide.

  Solace is lumbering now, struggling to maintain speed. One of the many dozen frigates has scored a palpable wound, and it sears the plasma drives and bleeds out momentum. Another enemy has managed to get a cluster of torpedoes hitting just aforeships of the bridge, knocking out a major sensor cluster. The effect on the bridge is strange – like putting on blurred oculus filters.

  But the enemy cannot stop this now. Solace is too close to its target, too massive and with too much of that all-important momentum. The crippled conveyer is trying to nudge out of range, but its engines are not designed for battlefield response. Somewhere on that ship, Vorx thinks, they are beginning to panic.

  Solace’s bows slip across the churning well of the gun’s maw. Its shadow slides across still-crackling iron plates, darkening an already dark-red hull. The gap between edges is now perilous – just a few hundred metres, in void terms almost nothing. Scraps of plasma lightning jump across the emptiness, briefly linking the two behemoths together before sparking into nothing.

  Vorx feels another faint thrill, another faint stir. He has placed his ship between the cannon and its target. It is a sacrificial move, one destined to provoke the tech-priests to fire now and unleash whatever they have wrapped up inside those layers of ugliness.

  Now Solace is fully across the kill-zone, interposed between the gun’s muzzle and the rest of the battle. Vorx can feel the tenseness on the bridge, the tightness of the jaws, the darting looks up at him from the pits. Any moment they expect to hear the explosions, the race of fire from the lower decks, the cold gasp of the void as it comes to grip them. He lets himself imagine the same thing, just for a second. He visualises the eruption from below, and the howl of flame and racing­ atmospheres, and enjoys it.

  To linger any longer, however, would be indulgent. The priests on that conveyer do not want to fire. Vorx is old enough and learned enough to recognise the pattern of their precious weapon. It is nova cannon-class, though larger than all but the very most ruinous battleship-slung varieties. Such guns are designed for extreme ranged fire, and its gunners would not detonate at this proximity, given the choice. That basic situation, though, on its own, would not normally be enough to keep them alive. A daring Mechanicus captain would take the risk to clear their sights, even if Solace’s destruction did some collateral damage of its own.

  But Vorx knows all the species of Imperial system-class weapons. He has spent centuries cataloguing them and cross-referencing them. He knows the difference between a shell created on Lucius and one created on Mars. Indeed, he knows th
e difference between a shell created in the northern-hemisphere macro-factories of Lucius and a shell created in the same world’s slightly less capable southern-hemisphere standard-production forges. He has often found such knowledge useful, for all that younger minds scoff at it, and this situation is no different.

  That cannon, he sees by its marks and dimensions, fires rift shells. On impact, rift shells open a short-lived tear into the warp, sending everything within their blast-sphere ripping into immaterialism. It is a horrifying weapon, capable of eating clean through the armoured hide of the greatest of warships, and requires enormous resources to deploy and engage.

  But it has its drawbacks. The destruction sphere is massive. Solace is now so close that, if the cannon fired, both ships would be sucked into the resultant vortex and caught up in a mutual embrace of destruction. The conveyer’s true target would thus never be hit, and whatever plan it was intended to achieve would go unexecuted. The Mechanicus would hate that. Right now, Vorx knows they are running every algorithm ever burned onto their systems to extract the weapon from this situation without its loss.

  They will not do so for long. Very soon, perhaps even this very second, they will realise that there is no escape from this tangle and that they really need to fire. The order will burn across the command synapses in the conveyer’s heart, damning both ships to oblivion.

  So Vorx acts. This momentary hesitation, generated by the tech-priests’ greatest and most excusable failing – pride in their creations – was all he required to get into position.

  ‘Tox-dump, all vents, full capacity,’ he orders, sending the comm-burst simultaneously to all command nodes with highest priority attached, knowing that the more acute of his section commanders will already have guessed what he has in mind and set things in train.

  And they have. Hatches slam back, pipes stiffen into full capacity, blast doors grind open. A thousand orifices across Solace’s underside gape, and the greenish flicker of void shields snatches out.

  The ship’s bowels open. The effluent is thick, black, stiff and frothing – a concentrated slurry of everything foul and curdled from the very depths of the warship’s chem-drenched intestines. It is the liquefied bones of strangled Neverborn, the excreta of the apothecarions, the refuse of the bioweapons labs, the run-off from Slert’s crowded experiment tables. For decades it has all stewed in Geller-shrouded containment tanks, fermenting and coagulating and spawning under heat lamps. New things have emerged in that soup of horror – chains of metal-gnawing molecules that copulate madly with strings of flesh-dissolving bacteria. The whole morass is shot through with the daemonic, bound by the warp and coalesced into void-defying globules. When it shoots out like projectile vomit into open space, it does not freeze-dry and explode – it only gushes more strongly, streaming in incontinent torrents in search of firm matter to latch on to.

  The impact is horrific – tonnes and tonnes of it in a roaring, bubbling cascade, crashing lumpily into the crackling cannon jaws and flooding down into the chasm beyond, overwhelming and choking, foaming like an incoming riptide. The conveyer’s weakened void shields are smashed aside. The cataracts seethe across every exposed plate. The lightning is drowned, the fires are drowned, all is drowned under that magnificent, stomach-turning payload of ruin.

  A purged Solace proceeds on course, stately and unhurried, while the conveyer crumples in on itself, its structure now being eaten alive. There are explosions from deep within as power cables are burned through. It loses trajectory, its acid-pocked prow dipping back towards Agripinaa’s gravity well, and great jets of fire escape from its under-hull. The nova cannon is now a semi-fused hunk of virulent metal, doused in foulness and folding in on itself like paper in a clenched fist. The tox-dump carries on eating, fizzing and consuming and melting, causing fresh explosions to ripple along the intact metalwork.

  Vorx watches it die on the rear-facing viewers. There is a pleasing irony in the weapon’s demise, he reflects – the biological gaining revenge on the mechanical. This is the kind of lesson that might be heeded, if only by more imaginative minds.

  ‘Marvellous,’ he breathes, observing the gathering pace of destruction.

  The luxury does not last long. Such flamboyant behaviour provokes a response, and already mainline attack ships are swivelling. Solace may not be the most assuming of vessels, a dreary hunk of grey-green matter amid a fleet of peacocks, but they know what it can do now.

  ‘Void shields back to full coverage,’ Vorx orders, returning to the throne. ‘Pick up speed. Drop two points towards re-entry.’

  He is already thinking again, studying the intricate web of threats and counter-threats. He sees the remnants of the conveyer’s escorts muster for yet another attack run, and their combined danger is considerable. He sees patterns emerge in constellations of larger vessels. The Blood Angels are here, and their strike cruisers are cutting through Kossolax’s formations with impeccable void mastery. The balance of power still remains with the Despoiler’s forces, and it is likely that planetfall will be achieved soon, but nothing is yet written into fate.

  Solace is getting battered. The tox-dump trick cannot be pulled again, for the ship’s innards are empty, so the next engagement will have to be of a more conventional kind – standard ranged weapons, boarding actions, the cut of blade and bolter in the dark. Dragan will be happy about that.

  Rhoe Twe is working well. They are pulling clear of the wreckage, carving a careful path. Kodad has the broadsides combining effectively. Now it is all about decisiveness, picking the right target.

  Vorx sees a ship plummeting fast to meet them from higher up in the sphere, piloted expertly, lean and blunt-edged. Its flanks are near-black grey, limned with silver. It is fresh from a kill of its own, and the straggling remains of a Thousand Sons frigate cling to its thruster trails.

  It is on an intercept course. Its flanks are burning, though not with impacts – boarding pods have been launched, and its solid-round batteries are gearing up for a salvo.

  For a second, he struggles to place the livery. It is Adeptus Astartes, that is clear, though the names and numbers elude him.

  Then he places it.

  ‘The Iron Shades,’ he says with relish. ‘Come about. That is our target.’

  VII: Castellans

  Chapter Fifteen

  The skies were once slate-grey, made choppy by winds from the Keldar sea and piled with cloud. The rains would be hard and cold, angled steeply and dashed against the dark rocks of a treacherous shore. Birds would wheel in those storms, thrown wildly. Men and women would look up and see the elemental fury of their home, and take quiet satisfaction.

  ‘This is a violent world,’ they would say. ‘So much the better, for breeding the strong.’

  Now the skies have no storms. The grey is gone, replaced by a dull red that strains the eyes and makes the heart beat too fast. The birds do not fly but crouch, bewildered, in their high eyries. The waves beat thickly against the rocks, but no spray flies. All is sluggish now, dark in the lee, glimmering like old oil.

  Xydias no longer looks to the coast for inspiration. For years he made his meditations high above the north-facing Delos Gate, feeling the ice-sharp wind against his face. He would watch the physical storm and reflect on the metaphysical storm. None would disturb him in those times, not even a fellow battle-brother. For just a few minutes, immediately before dawn, he was alone with the elements. When the first of the world’s suns rose, sending a long line of silver spreading across the broken horizon, making the wave-tops glint like spear tips, he would close his eyes.

  ‘As Ultramar, so the galaxy,’ he would say, recounting the last words uttered, reportedly, from the lips of the primarch himself to the first Chapter Master before leaving distant Macragge.

  It had always been an ambitious goal, so far from the heart of power. The precise reasons for the exodus were long lost to the vagaries of time, though th
e intent was never doubted. Close to ten thousand years of service, unbroken, defiant, set right up against the borders of reality. Ultramar would never be remade here, on the fringes of the Eye itself, but a fraction of its resolve persisted, lodged deep. Worlds were raised and kept guarded, populations made orderly. The law came to the Sabatine subsector and was nourished, putting down roots.

  Now Xydias only sees the end of that long story. In his darkest moments, he thinks of the line of Chapter Masters engraved on the basalt of the Hall of Honour, flickering by the light of oil-taper candles. He thinks of his own name, Cymar Xydias, the very last. He thinks on the artisans who have chiselled those names, one after the other, centuries apart but linked by that single thread of history.

  Mostly, defiance remains. He plans, he makes provision. He ensures that all around him is set right, and that the walls are still guarded. He does not allow doubt to enter his disciplined mind, certainly not despair. He remains, as he has ever been, efficient and active.

  But his name has no successors. It remains there, near the base of a single slab of stone, with empty space for more. That empty space is a rebuke. If he allowed it to, it would haunt him.

  Xydias strides along the corridor leading from the Gyges Gate towards the inner keep. Dawn is still an hour away, and only the weakest red light bleeds through the narrow windows. It is bitterly cold, though his armour shields him from the worst. He has been armoured, without respite, for months now. All of the remaining garrison have been, by his orders.

  He is weary to his core. His hands, locked away in those heavy gauntlets, hang by his side. To remain on his feet, to remain awake and alert – these are challenges now. Perhaps the loss of the Astronomican is part of this. Perhaps they never truly realised just how profound the link was with the beacon, invisible to all but the psykers and the Navigators but somehow sensed. Its removal has done more than cripple shipping and supply routes – it has removed something essential and intangible, the great link to the Throneworld that they all, even the Space Marines, needed to feel.