The Path of Heaven Read online

  ‘Recognise it?’

  ‘No. It’s still incoming.’

  They reached the main viewing platform. Above them a crystalflex dome opened up, webbed with metal and streaked with aeons-old void-grime. Kulba took a deep breath and looked up.

  Half her convoy was visible out there, hanging above the Terce Falion in a procession of immensity. Angle-sided and heavy-jowled, the big haulers stretched off into darkness, their thrusters burning low orange. Each ship was over fifty kilometres long, though almost all that bulk was given over to colossal series modules, packed with ranks of shackled container units. No human crew member went into those cavernous spaces, for the only populated sections of the ships were the tiny blisters on the forward hull-ridge, where the cortex-bridges were lodged. Everything else was silent, enclosed, locked down, sealed in.

  Kulba saw the underside of the Revo Satisa slide above them, and watched the rows upon rows upon rows of stowage modules pass in stately sluggishness. Beyond that ship was the Daughter of Loeb, and beyond that was the Cold as Stars.

  ‘How soon until we break the veil?’ Kulba asked.

  ‘Three hours,’ replied Cavelli softly.

  Kulba didn’t look at him. She didn’t like Navigators either. They made her spine creep, with their third swathed eye and their parchment skin and their shuffling. Cavelli smelt bad, too; always had. The stench was something faint, undefinable, a pheromone or some other spoor of mutation.

  ‘We could make the jump now,’ she said.

  ‘Then we would lose a third of the convoy,’ said Cavelli, smiling apologetically. ‘I do not have the manifolds for nine of the haulers.’

  ‘And we have orders,’ Alobus reminded her. ‘Legion orders.’

  Kulba hawked up spittle and sent it sailing over the gantry edge. Void-nausea pulled at her innards. The stars glinted back at her from beyond the crystalflex bubble, malicious, eternal.

  ‘How close are they?’ she asked, resigned to more waiting in real space. The sooner the convoy pulled into the turbulent hell of the warp, the sooner they would know how many of them would make it to the Narrows in one piece.

  Alobus consulted the snaked-head chrono-augur embedded in the back of his hair-flecked hand. ‘Less than… Well, I am mistaken. Getting something now. They must be early.’

  That was when Kulba knew. They were never early: the III Legion were degenerating fast but they were still sticklers for detail, and if they had given a chrono-mark, they meant to keep it.

  ‘Dispatch all pickets,’ she ordered, narrowing her eyes, peering out into the dark. ‘Tell them if they see anything on intercept, open fire.’

  She pressed the alert bead on the inside of her palm and felt sweat there.

  Alobus looked at her, uncertain. ‘Ma’am, do you–’

  ‘Say nothing.’ Kulba saw the plasma bursts of thrusters firing as the convoy’s escorts spiralled out to the margins, taking up fire-lattice positions. The bridge’s lumens sunk down to combat-red, and flare-marks appears on cogitator consoles. ‘If you wish to do anything now, double-check this Legion communication and hope it proves accurate.’

  The void-behemoths made no course correction. It took hours just to calibrate them for a change of trajectory, and unless that was done they would keep ploughing along the same vector until the last supernova in the galaxy blew itself out. Their picket fleet, around fifty lance-bearing sub-warp corvettes, reached the perimeter of the defensive envelope and took up station.

  Cavelli drew in a breath and closed his natural eyes. Kulba turned on him. ‘You sense something?’

  He gave her another one of those damnable half-smiles, but kept his eyes closed. ‘I am an old man. In truth, I feel lucky to have made it this far with you.’

  As he spoke, every cogitator console across the bridge suddenly went dark. Void-navigation sigils flickered out, and the lumens overhead began to fizz.

  ‘Get them back on!’ shouted Kulba, rounding on the hubbub of her crew down in the pits. As they struggled to restore command, the silent flash of las-fire burst out from the void.

  The consoles cleared. Initially, three lines of text in standard Gothic scrolled down the screens, clear enough for Kulba to read even at distance.

  OATH-BREAKERS.

  YOU ARE NOW JUDGED.

  WE ARE THE PUNISHMENT.

  Kulba knew that every officer on every bulk carrier would be reading the same thing. ‘Stay at your stations!’ she bellowed, turning back from the real-view portals and striding down the gantry. ‘Pull in manifolds! Prepare warp-cycle for ignition!’

  That last order was a nonsense – even if Cavelli had initiated his preparatory studies, it would still have taken too long to key in the warp drives – but she had to say something. For the first time in her long and mostly hateful career, she was entirely at a loss.

  Kulba made it five metres down the gantry before the first physical impact came in. She heard a hard smash somewhere high up in the cortex-bridge’s anterior shield cluster, followed by the shriek of metal being torn.

  The text on the consoles snapped out, to be replaced by an image: a stylised lightning strike across a horizontal bar.

  ‘What is that?’ demanded Kulba, reaching the nearest viewer screen and grabbing it with both hands.

  More crashes from up above followed, and the oculus was riven with flashes of silver. Alobus was frozen with indecision, but Cavelli started chuckling.

  Kulba pulled the screen from its housing and whirled to face the Navigator. She thrust the image at him. ‘What is that? You know, don’t you?’

  Cavelli nodded. ‘And if you had studied the livery of mankind’s Legions, sister, you would know it too. But what does this matter? Any one of the Cartomancer’s Twenty Visions would be more than enough for us.’

  Kulba threw the screen down and grabbed Cavelli by his robes. The Navigator’s old body felt like a sack of bones under the rich velvet. ‘What does it mean?’ she hissed.

  Cavelli opened his mortal eyes, and gave her a steady look free of either fear or hope.

  ‘Nothing made by the hand of man moves faster,’ he murmured, lost in something like awe. ‘They are magnificent. But let me tell you one more thing of them, for it is the last you will ever learn.’

  He leaned closer to her, and his breath, scented with cloves, brushed against her face.

  ‘They are still laughing.’

  Two

  Sixty Shu’urga-pattern Xiphon interceptors screamed out from the hangars of the Kaljian and the Amujin, fell sharply to clear the wake of their motherships’ main thrusters, then kicked into full speed. Behind them boomed twenty Storm Eagle gunships, slower but more heavily armed. The raiders spread wide, fanning out into hunting packs and boosting into pre-arranged attack paths.

  The convoy lay ahead of them, wallowing, sluggish, surrounded by its protective shell of escorts. The Kaljian moved to a high-plane observation position, opening up with broadside volleys to hit the flanks of the distant leviathans. The Amujin, the smaller of the two White Scars attack frigates, fell away to take up guard position further back towards the local-space Mandeville point.

  Shiban Khan glanced down at the spread of ships under his command, took in the velocities and the angles and the cohesion, and made his choices.

  ‘Like sleeping cattle,’ he voxed, pushing his interceptor into a corkscrewing climb.

  Jochi, hurtling less than thirty metres from his starboard wing, laughed. ‘Then we will wake them.’

  The arrow-head formation of V Legion void fighters burst through the outer perimeter of guard-ships, far too fast to be tracked by the basic defence-nets of the picket vessels. Lance-beams scythed harmlessly above and below the diving interceptors, lighting up their bone-white chassis, the lightning strikes, the gold and crimson.

  The underhull of the lead hauler loomed ahead, rust-red, lit with
half-moon plasma thrusters. Its long series of armoured cargo-units stretched off into the dark like the shell of some immense creeping insectoid.

  Shiban’s squadron shot under the approaching lip of the rear engine-housing, swerving to avoid the blur of las-fire pumping from servitor track cannons. Targeting wireframes rotated and shifted across the cockpit’s forward viewscreen, latching on to a thousand targets a second before isolating the most effective locus.

  Shiban ignored the cogitated results and aimed the lascannons manually. Driving the thrusters to within a micrometre of their redlines, he strafed along the void-shield-warded flanks, watching fissures form at his weapons’ impact sites.

  ‘Bridge sighted,’ Shiban voxed.

  His fighter swung out from under the hull’s shadow, then tore up the leading edge of the hull-plates, sending multicoloured static from the bulk carrier’s void shields blowing outwards like spray from an ocean-speeder. The rest of the squadron came with him, staying tight on his wing.

  ‘On my mark,’ ordered Shiban, switching to his fighter’s missile control system.

  The Xiphon interceptors rolled into position, swerving around incoming las-fire, each one a blurred-edge smear of speed. Jochi went high, pulling a whole gamut of projectiles with him and leaving the attack run ahead thinned of flak.

  The attackers cleared the last bulkhead, exposing the bridge complex perched atop the hunched spine of the bulk carrier.

  ‘Mark.’

  Rotary missile launchers sent streaks of neon-white tearing towards the metal-line horizon. Silent explosions rippled out, smashing through the vessel’s shield generators. The interceptors ripped through a spray of burst armour-plates, tumbling away from the kaleidoscope of debris.

  ‘Hai Chogoris!’ whooped Jochi, pushing his fighter’s angle steeply back towards the hunting pack.

  All across the lumbering convoy, similar explosions lit up the void, each one taking out a bulk carrier’s void shield coverage and leaving its heavy adamantium hull exposed. Pinpoint lines of las-fire and heavy-round cannons kept driving out from weaponised flanks, but none of it was close to hitting the mark.

  Shiban wheeled away, choking his speed for just long enough to arrest the overshoot, then nudged the muzzle of his fighter towards the gaping maw of the hangar mouths.

  For a moment, he thought he recognised the profile – the blinking marker lights, the chevroned warning livery, the vast cliff-faces of steel. He had hit a hundred such targets over past months, and they merged into one another. That had become life for them all now – hit-and-run scavengers, taking out the weak and the slow, hampering the mammoth warfront and pulling free before its enormous pincers could close on them. Every raid hurt the enemy, depriving him of the communication lines, materiel, supplies and troops that he needed, but it hurt them too, for the Warmaster had teeth of his own.

  ‘Follow me in,’ Shiban ordered, piling back into full velocity.

  The approach was thick with glowing lines of las-fire. The bulk carrier’s crew were attempting to lower blast-doors across the hangar entrance, and Shiban opened up with his lascannons. The piston-arms shattered, leaving the blast-doors half lowered. That left a gap of less than eight metres to thread through at near full tilt. The test made Shiban smile for the first time on that mission, and his fingers clenched a little tighter around his control columns.

  We would do this for sport, in another age.

  He pushed down on the throttle, and screamed low across the remaining ground. The hangar entrance swam up before him, and he slewed across its face before powering through the narrow aperture.

  Inside, a cavernous void opened up, easily capable of housing ships a hundred times the size of his own. Enormous hauler claws hung from roof-mounted tracks, illuminated by the red fog of combat lighting. Ranks of landing platforms stretched away into the gloom.

  Shiban compensated for the shift into the bulk carrier’s gravity well, switched to atmospheric drives and applied his newly cycling airbrakes hard. The Xiphon spun around over its centre and came down heavily onto the nearest platform, shrouded in vapour and ribbons of atomising plasma.

  The fighter’s cockpit locks blew, and Shiban pulled himself from his seat, taking up his favoured guan dao as he leapt down to the rockcrete. Defence servitors were already shambling towards him, levelling autoguns and limb-mounted carbines. Shiban burst into a sprint, smashing the heel of his blade into the steel-ringed throat of the closest attacker, pushing away and punching his blade through the stomach of another, whirling around to smash the legs out from under a third, before pushing out and beheading the fourth.

  All across the hangar his brothers were doing the same – powering from their fighters and racing out across the echoing chamber. None of them moved like Shiban, though. Where their weapon-strikes were fluid, his were jabbing; where they danced and feinted, he smashed and careened. Their armour was the same as the Brotherhood of the Storm had worn since the first days of its inauguration on Chogoris: ivory plates, rimmed with red and gold and marked with three lightning bolts – the sign of the minghan. Only Shiban’s right pauldron still bore those old marks, those old colours. The rest of his armour was a steely grey, pocked with shell craters and marred by the patina of combat. His plates were thicker than the others’, knitted together with cables and clamps and fusion-locks. He called those things the Shackles – the damned Mechanicum devices that kept him alive, kept him moving, kept him fighting. Within them, his body was now a mongrel thing, part-superhuman, part-ruined.

  Szu-Ilya had spoken truly to him, what seemed like a lifetime ago.

  ‘In another Legion,’ she had said, ‘they tell me you might have been placed in a Dreadnought.’

  A half-tracked servitor with iron pincers for hands rumbled towards him, and he leapt, using metal muscle-stimms lodged amid the sinews of his body. The guan dao whirled, tracing a perfect arc through the smog-laced atmosphere, slicing the man-machine’s upper feed-cables. Shiban’s momentum carried him into its embrace, and a crunch down from his clenched fist cracked its skull open, terminating the commands to its rudimentary impulse units. It was a move impelled by the embers of fury. It had never been that way before.

  He shoved the twitching corpse aside and kept moving. Two hundred metres away lay the first of many doors leading into the vast ship’s interior. The nine battle-brothers of his arban were close on his heels, only pausing to despatch the last of the hangar’s defence force. They converged on the doors to a lifter shaft, their armour spattered with thin blood and viscous engine oils. All his warriors were helmed against the void, and their armour was covered with unique battle-marks – skulls, skins, signs of the vanquished – binding defeated souls to the armour of the one who had killed them.

  Jochi was carrying the severed head of a mortal trooper in one hand, and let it thud to the deck.

  ‘I do not think they saw us coming,’ he said.

  ‘They saw plenty,’ said Shiban, mag-locking his blade and pulling up a schematic from the wall-mounted cogitator unit. ‘They are weak, not blind.’

  He inserted a control wafer into the cogitator unit and the lifter access codes cycled down his helm display. He took control of the access shafts, the ship’s shield subsystems, six other critical lattice-nets and the base level navigation grid.

  ‘Anything, then, Tachseer?’ Jochi asked, his enthusiasm reduced, shaking the blood from his blade.

  Tachseer. They insisted on calling him that – all of them, now – and it was long past the time for resisting.

  Shiban interrogated the augur-node implanted in his cranial interface. It caused him significant pain to use, just as every action – moving, breathing, killing – caused him significant pain. For a moment all he saw was the local-space tactical sphere, clogged with the burning shells of convoy pickets. The Kaljian remained in close, the Amujin further off. He was about to respond in the negative, to o
rder the ascent to the bridge, when he sensed the first signal closing.

  ‘Not far behind,’ he murmured, as if that were something that had ever been different. He looked up, reaching for his locked glaive. ‘They remain quick.’

  ‘You have a ship-mark?’ Jochi asked.

  ‘What does it matter?’ said Shiban, calling up the lifter platform and activating his glaive’s disruptor. ‘They will come, and we will end them.’

  He paused before passing over the threshold. There weren’t as many incoming signals as he had expected. That boded poorly for the opposite flank of the move. All the games were getting old, and perhaps even the Khan’s mind could now be read by the enemy, just as they seemed to read all else.

  A lifter platform shuddered into view on steam-wreathed metal columns, and the blast-doors ground open in a trail of sparks. A ship-ident flashed across his helm display, picked out in the Imperial Gothic runes that had once been a symbol of the dominance of humanity and now felt like the emblem of its folly.

  Suzerain.

  ‘Come,’ he said, moving into the lifter shaft, his glaive glowing electric-blue against the dark. ‘The debauched are on our heels.’

  No ship was suffered to break the veil ahead of the flagship. The Proudheart shattered the barrier between realms first, and in its wake came the outriders, pulling wide once the transition to the materium had been fixed and taking up pinpoint assault positions.

  Eidolon, standing in the observation tower of his private hull-citadel, watched his fleet deploy, ship by ship. The capital vessels fell into the Chemos-authorised formations they had used since the earliest days of the Crusade, covering one another’s trajectories, mapping broadside solutions to each other, sliding into the abyss like sharks through the ocean’s swell.

  They had lost nothing in precision. The purple-and-gold tide spread across the emptiness, hitting cruising velocity well within Legion expectations. Crystal spires glittered like frozen tears. Jewels reflected the light of the stars. It was beautiful, impressively beautiful.