The Emperor's Gift Read online

  ‘We are still alive, aren’t we?’ I voxed back.

  ‘You almost weren’t,’ Malchadiel pointed out.

  I sent Sothis my thanks in silence – a psychic sense of admiration and gratitude.

  +Hyperion is right.+ Galeo’s thoughts were calmer now the foe’s numbers were diminished. His movements had cooled to something clinical. +We face the lesser corruption. These are no more than spiteful dregs pulled from the warp by a desperate enemy.+

  Sothis wasn’t convinced. ‘But you banished the–’

  +It fled.+ Galeo’s reproaching aura prickled at my skin, for I was its target. +It fled before the final blow.+

  ‘Fled to where?’ Dumenidon voxed. My brother’s words died as the deck rumbled beneath our feet. I knew that motion. Anyone that had ever set foot on a spaceship knew it. A drive pulse. The Frostborn was breathing again.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Malchadiel whispered. ‘The ship is dead. This isn’t possible.’

  Weak light flooded the ruined chamber, and brought power to everything else with it. Industrial warning sirens flashed amber along the ceiling, their wails still lost in the vacuum. Elsewhere on board, machines were awakening to their abandoned duties. I sensed cranes grinding to life, sending shivers through the deck as they turned slowly in their sockets, loading huge warheads into their turret feeds. The ship was readying itself for a battle that would never be fought, preparing to fire on an enemy that didn’t exist.

  The angels were mist-thin and weak now, so few in number as to offer no threat at all.

  ‘Guard me,’ I said again.

  ‘You always say that,’ Sothis voxed, ‘when you are about to undertake someth–’

  I never heard the rest of his sentence.

  I fled my body.

  The sending was an inelegant, fevered thing, formed from rage and need. While my physical presence remained a chanting, motionless weight in the Navigator’s chamber, my senses roared down the labyrinthine corridors, leaving the brittle touch of hoarfrost on the walls in my wake. The whole ship was alive, even if only barely lit by flickering lume-globes. Several shattered as I cut past them.

  I screamed through the ship’s core, senses peeled raw to the merest sight, sound or scent of life.

  +You are reaching too far, too fast. Return, brother.+

  I raced on. This was my fault. The flaw lay with me. My error had led to the daemon fleeing the Navigator’s form, and it fell to me to redeem the tarnish done in the name of duty.

  +Hyperion,+ Galeo warned me. +Return to us.+ As if I’d not spent decades enduring soul-breaking trials to earn the armour I wore. As if I had no ability to spend my strength according to my own judgement.

  +I know the limits of my own power, justicar.+

  +Do not mistake an order as a request, Hyperion.+

  I was close to the answer. The enginarium was bathed in the same illumination as the rest of the ship, and here the evidence of activity was undeniable. My senses crashed across consoles, sucking up the taste of any lingering sentience in the chamber in the hunt for psychic spoor. Something, something…

  +Return now.+ Galeo buffeted me with the demand, and I almost obeyed the psychic compulsion laced behind the words. He’d trained us well.

  +Wait, justicar. I see it.+ And there it was, as obvious and sourceless as the taste of blood in the back of the throat.

  I focused. Breathed. Turned. The sensation stroked over me in a bitter caress, born from a cluster of secondary power generators latched with parasitic glee to the still-cold plasma drive. While all other power stations remained cold, this lone generator was shuddering as it resurrected itself.

  The drive core’s turgid, grey plasma gave a liquid heave. I saw a hand, or something like one, press against the glass from within the fusion ooze. As it dissolved into the dense muck, leering features – the side of a human face – pressed one eye to the glass. It vanished within a moment, absorbed back into the engine slime.

  Other secondary generators started shivering.

  +The daemon is here, justicar. It swims within the drive core, inside the machine-spirit’s bones, resurrecting the ship.+

  I snapped back to my body for long enough to tear Malchadiel from his. So deprived, his armoured form would have collapsed but for the lack of gravity. Instead, it stood swaying, bolted down by its boots. Both of his swords drifted out of slack grips. His head rolled loose on his neck.

  +Wh–+ he tried to send to me.

  +Wait. Look.+ I hurled his consciousness into the enginarium. +That,+ I demanded. +What is that?+

  The generators were bleeding. Blood the colour of oil ran in a sheet down the transparent tube beneath it, obfuscating the cooled plasma solidified in the main core. The rippling blood didn’t freeze. It obeyed no physics beyond its own.

  Malchadiel needed a moment to focus himself. +It’s…+

  And then he was drifting. I’d torn his senses free without warning or ritual, and I could feel his essence spreading thin across the chamber. The psychic equivalent of a slap thankfully forced him to come together. After the battle, I lacked the strength to reassemble him if he’d truly drifted apart.

  +That is the…+ He hesitated. His presence grew cold.

  +Mal?+

  No answer. He was gone in an instant, clawing his way back to his body. I was faster. I surged back, and dragged him with me.

  We opened our eyes in the same moment, and both said ‘Justicar’ at once.

  Galeo was wrenching his blade from the last burning body. +Speak.+

  Faster by far to send the images into his mind: the daemon within the plasma ooze; the creature spreading itself through the drive core; the secondary brain-cogitators once belonging to the machine-spirit, now housing a panicking daemonic intelligence.

  +The bleeding generators. What do they control?+

  Malchadiel recovered his blades from the air, sheathing them at his hips. ‘The magnetic ignition for the warp drive.’

  Dumenidon ceased his reverent chanting, sheathing his own blade. ‘Our prey seeks to jump the ship back into the warp with no guidance? No crew? With only us on board?’

  Malchadiel shook his head. ‘No, brother. It is cycling up the generators necessary to eject the core into the void.’

  ‘That makes no–’ Sothis started.

  ‘The detonation will not be contained by a localised Geller field.’ Irritation coupled with desperation, leaving his voice sharp. ‘There is no failsafe, no contingency. A daemon pulls these strings. The core will blow cold, right in the void.’

  ‘A beacon to those behind the veil,’ I finished.

  +Move,+ Galeo sent. +Move.+

  SEVEN

  RIFT

  I

  Annika’s first reaction when I reconnected with her was to curse at me. It was a theme in my dealings with the inquisitor thus far, and in the past I’d found it amusing. Not so, this time.

  +Be silent,+ I told her. For a wonder, she actually was. +Inquisitor, you must get the Karabela to a minimum safe distance immediately. The Frostborn is ejecting its warp core.+

  ‘Why?’ she sent back. ‘Destroy the Navigator and end the corruption at the source, with visual confirmation.’

  We were moving as fast as we could, kicking off walls and shooting down hallways, guiding our flight through the arched corridors by boot and palm against the dark walls. Anaemic lighting flickered as the ship’s temperamental power core objected to its false reawakening.

  +We aren’t voiding the warp core – the ship itself is doing it. The daemon is stronger, subtler, than we believed. It fled the Navigator’s body, to dwell inside the ship’s heart. There it pulls at the machine-spirit’s strings. We are unlikely to be able to stop it in time.+

  ‘But the detonation will–’

  +Get the Karabela to a safe distance.+ I felt her wince at the strength of my sending, but I was far beyond caring. Why was she trying to tell me things I already knew? Did she believe now was the best time for such redundancies?
+Do it now, human.+

  ‘As you wish.’ A pause. I could feel her breathing, so far away. ‘We’re under way. You know I cannot teleport you back from this distance.’

  +I know.+ I was touched she’d even consider it. Many inquisitors wouldn’t. +We all know. If we don’t survive, be ready to run for Titan with word of Armageddon. The monastery must be warned.+

  ‘So be it.’ She faded into silence. I could feel what she wanted to say. She wished to apologise for letting her anger get the better of her, and for sending us here to die, but the word ‘sorry’ was too alien to an inquisitor’s tongue. ‘Hyperion?’

  +Mistress?+

  ‘Hiljah kah uhtganjen mev tarvahettan.’

  My laughter carried over the vox. Greet the end with courage. Fenrisian poetry at its blunt best.

  ‘What is it?’ Malchadiel asked. ‘What’s so amusing?’

  ‘Nothing, brother,’ I replied. +Inquisitor?+

  ‘Yes?’

  +We have a similar valediction in the Terran System. We say ‘Die well’.+

  I felt her faint amusement, through our bond. ‘I prefer the Fenrisian term.’

  ‘The Karabela is moving,’ I voxed to my kindred. Sirens flashed in the soundless air around us. Ahead of me, Malchadiel kicked off from a slanting wall and surged down a side corridor.

  ‘I’m not going to die here,’ he said. ‘I will not die before seeing Mars.’

  The deck shook beneath us, a lurching heave as the warship disgorged its intestines into the void. I heard Malchadiel murmuring to himself, speaking of Geller fields and the madness of a daemon infecting a machine-spirit. He sounded both disgusted and amazed.

  ‘The Frostborn has jettisoned its power cores,’ Annika sent to me.

  +I know. We felt it. Are you clear?+

  ‘We’re clear. I’ve never seen an active warp core breached in the void. Not without its failsafes and containment fields.’

  Nor had I, and archival description was a rather dry substitute. +Tell me what you’re seeing.+

  She was silent for some time. ‘Witch-lightning. The plasma drive tubes are covered in it. They’re going to… Hyperion? Did you feel that?’

  How could I not? Wetness at my mouth’s edge let me know I was drooling, as every muscle in my body contracted and flexed to their own desires. Unable to focus, I felt myself crash into a wall.

  ‘It’s gone,’ she said. ‘It’s destroyed.’

  Galeo, suffering as I suffered, pulled me back to face the corridor’s end. +Warp breach,+ he sent, his silent voice tight with pain. +A painful one.+

  ‘Hyperion?’

  I couldn’t separate the voices in my mind – not the justicar’s, not the inquisitor’s, nor the hundreds of new voices that screamed and shrieked, demanding to be heard. Whatever foulness lay on the other side of the breach, it promised to be numerous.

  In that moment, the blast wave struck. The Frostborn, what was left of its magnificent bulk, juddered in an invisible grip. Each of us slammed to the floor, locking our boots to the decking and crouching to ride out the storm.

  ‘I’m beginning to wish,’ Sothis voxed, ‘that we’d never come with Annika after Cheth.’

  II

  The warp core chamber no longer existed. The entirety of its rear half was open to the void, offering a mist-wreathed view of the shrouded stars. All the walls and machinery I’d seen in my sending – all gone, spat out to tumble through space. Where power generators and fusion cores had rested, bound in immense sockets, empty tracks and scorched metal marked the systems’ absence. The Frostborn would never move again. She’d jettisoned every vital generator across a dozen decks, breaking her own back purely to make her last shriek that little bit louder.

  It had worked well enough. That last shriek had torn a wound in reality. Had the Karabela been closer, our own vessel would have been caught in the detonation, and its own sensitive warp core could easily have died in sympathy with the Frostborn’s.

  We watched the bulk of broken black-iron machinery twisting away through the nebula, drowning in dust. No more than three thousand metres away, where the principal drive engines had been, a slice in the galaxy was bleeding filth into the void. Voices lashed at me from that rift – human, alien and otherwise – all screaming in languages I came tantalisingly close to understanding. A word here, a meaning there. I knew I’d be able to comprehend them if I concentrated.

  +Don’t.+

  I glanced at Galeo. He was shaking his head. +Don’t,+ he said again. +Do not even try.+

  The gash of sliced space stared back at us, a slitted violet snake-eye with a writhing white iris. I felt the malignancy of an inhuman intelligence staring right back.

  Dumenidon was the first to tense. ‘I see them,’ he said softly.

  They came on wings the colour of tormented flesh, their skin the same aggrieved red. Even as they spat across the void, streaming towards us from such a distance, I could see their reaching claws. Hundreds of them. Hundreds. Some weak. Some strong. Some I recognised from the archives or their inscriptions upon the Arcus Daemonica; many more perhaps no one had ever borne witness to.

  +Focus on the Aegis,+ Galeo ordered. +Maintain it with all available strength. They will break against us like a tide against the rocks. Many, many of them are weak and spineless things, emboldened only by their first taste of the material realm. We will banish them with no effort at all. Stand ready, brothers.+

  We raised our weapons as one. Galeo and Dumenidon clutched theirs in two-handed warding grips. Malachadiel stood absolutely motionless, falchions crossed at the hilts. Sothis stroked his blades together, sending sparks of force spitting from the edges as their protesting energy fields overlapped. My stave whirled slowly, a propeller of blurring force. It flared with light as larger chunks of grit burst in its refractor aura.

  +One last matter. Twins?+

  ‘Yes, justicar,’ they said in perfect harmony.

  +Castian will not end this way, nor on this night. Sothis, I did not survive the massacre at Ajanta just to let the squad’s legacy end here. And Malchadiel, you will see Mars. On my life, I swear it.+

  ‘I never doubted it, justicar,’ Malchadiel replied. I could sense his smile, even if I couldn’t see it.

  I was still watching the nascent rift, and the sickness spilling forth. A great shape, something more mythological devil than man, screamed its way through a horrendous birth. The thing clawed its way from the burning warp-womb to fall, hissing and smoking, into the cold vacuum. It streaked towards us, slaying its weaker kindred in its vicious haste.

  ‘I never believed I would see one of those,’ Sothis said quietly. I could scarcely believe my eyes, either.

  +We will see it slain, Castian. Faith is our shield.+

  It took me several heartbeats to realise I’d been the one to send those words, not Galeo.

  III

  They broke against us, just as Galeo had promised. The Aegis slowed them, withering the strength in their limbs, but our collective aura was never going to do more than weaken a horde of such size. In union, my four brothers began chopping, cleaving, carving. Viscera burst across our armour, sizzling in the void as it evaporated in our reality. Temperature gauges flashed and chimed as the daemons’ burning blood washed against my ceramite in short-lived splashes. The cold void did nothing to freeze netherworldly blood.

  Each crack of my stave broke a ridged skull or pounded through an open mouth, cracking fangs and impaling the throat beyond. In banishment, the creatures had little binding them together: some ruptured in the weightless air, others writhed as they were immolated. Horns and malformed skulls crashed against my war plate in a melody made from blunt clanks; I spared my stave to block each incoming blade, ignoring these lesser threats. Every deflection was a star in the gloom, refractor flares lighting up the remains of the chamber with the intensity of a stuttering star.

  ‘Up,’ Malchadiel voxed. He crashed his swords together once, forcing the energy fields to burn any trace matter away
from the blades, and kicked off the decking without another word.

  Two creatures barred my way, their too-long tongues lashing across my armour in a scraping caress. The first beast died to a surge of psychic force, blasting it back against a wall to dissolve against the hull. The second staggered, its head cracked open by my return blow, barbed tongue thrashing with blind anguish. I reached for the staggering creature with my sixth sense, caught it with a telekine’s grip around its throat, and dragged it closer. Its worthless struggles ended as I butted my helm into its choking face, breaking whatever passed for bone in its hideous head. With an outstretched arm, I cast it back into the void. Let it bleed its sick fire into space.

  +Maintain the Aegis,+ Galeo sent, his thoughts bladed in their urgency. +Cease whoring away your power, Hyperion.+

  I was already up, soaring higher, joining my brother on the curving ceiling. We locked our boots to the roof, weapons spinning, falling back into a killing rhythm as we stood back to back.

  From then on, to my shame, it was impossible to follow my brothers’ battles. Every shred of my focus bled into spinning the stave, crashing against black sword blades and cracking into unprotected bodies.

  I killed something with seven faces. I killed something that knew my name, and something else that addressed me by names I’d never heard, or only read about in the monastery’s archives. I killed and killed and killed, saving my strength as best as I was able, for what we knew was soon to come. Angels and daemons alike fell back from us in a broken tide of shrieks and searing blood.

  The chamber fell dark as the nebula’s gritty, gaseous brightness was eclipsed at last. Unable to turn and face the new threat, I leeched from Malchadiel’s senses. His thoughts had never felt so cold.

  ‘War given form,’ he said beneath his breath.

  EIGHT

  GAMBITS

  I