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  ‘I heard bolter fire.’

  XV

  REBORN

  The Exalted reclined on its throne, forcing its face into a smile.

  ‘It is a blessing to see you, brother.’

  The hulking shape of Malcharion dominated the Covenant’s bridge. Light from the console screens flickered across his body’s dark ceramite hull.

  With the ship idle in orbit, the crew, those human enough to care, were free to cast sidelong glances at the incredible sight in their midst. Malcharion stood alone before the commander’s raised central dais. The Dreadnought was tall enough that its sarcophagus was level with the seated figure.

  Alongside the walls, every Astartes not engaged in planetary operations had gathered to witness the resurrection – and the first meeting with the Exalted. Talos and Adhemar stood in rapt awe. So did most of the others.

  Around the Exalted’s throne stood the Atramentar. All of them, except for Vraal. Seven warriors, the Terminator elite, in an orderly half-ring behind the throne. Malek and Garadon stood closest to the Exalted, as always.

  For the longest time, the war machine said nothing. The Exalted watched with its slanted black eyes, raptor-like in his attention to detail. It fancied it could almost hear, under the ever-present hum of the Dreadnought’s back-mounted power generator, the occasional bubbling swish of the amniotic fluid within the sarcophagus as whatever remained of Malcharion’s mortal body twitched.

  ‘You have changed,’ the Dreadnought boomed.

  The Exalted’s smirk did not fade, indeed it became suddenly more genuine. ‘As have you, brother.’

  The machine made a noise akin to a grunt of acknowledgement. It sounded like a tank shifting gears.

  ‘You are uglier than I remember.’ Another gear-change grunt, this one closer to a chuckle. ‘I would not have believed it possible.’

  ‘I see your decades of inactivity while the rest of us waged our father’s war have not dimmed your… humour.’

  ‘Do not bore me back into slumber with your dour nature, Vandred.’

  ‘I am the Exalted now. You would do well to heed that, Malcharion. Time has changed many things.’

  ‘Not everything. Hear me, Vandred. I have awoken. Torn from a century of nightmares, each one a memory of our greatest failure. The Soul Hunter tells me that war calls once more. You will tell me of this war. Now.’

  The Exalted’s lips curled. The Soul Hunter. Sickening.

  ‘As you wish.’

  The battlefield had several names. None of them quite carried the weight of true import. This was to be the decisive conflict, the moment of truth.

  Located in the highest reaches of the northern hemisphere’s mountain range, it was the bastion of Mechanicus strength above the equator.

  To the invaders, grudgingly impressed by the curving rock formations and the fortress-factories built into them, it was the Omnissiah’s Claw. A theatrical name, but apt: the mountains resembled steel fingers reaching for the heavens, as if the fortresses could tear the invader vessels from orbit.

  To the cold cogitators and tactical logic engines of the Mechanicus defenders, it was simply Site 017-017.

  Seventeen-Seventeen, the main foundry of the Legio Maledictis, heart and soul of Crythe Prime’s Adeptus Titanicus forces.

  And void-shielded so densely that orbital bombardment was utterly beyond hope. Ironically, such a defence was pointless. Abaddon had made it clear to his captains and commanders that Seventeen-Seventeen was to be captured, not destroyed. Such a base would be able to repair, outfit and construct Titans to serve in his coming crusade. At the very least, huge quantities of materiel and resources could be plundered from the fortress-factories here.

  Time, however, was growing short. Astropaths across the fleet told of whispers within the warp. The Imperium’s response to the invasion would arrive within weeks.

  The Blood Angels. The Marines Errant. Countless regiments of the Imperial Guard. Abaddon had ventured far from his haven within the warp anomaly known as the Eye of Terror, where the Imperium could never follow. While he had chosen a fine target in Crythe and hit the world with the decisive power of this hastily-assembled fleet, victory must now come quickly or be abandoned altogether. Already the month of war had been drawn out too long, and ground taken at too high a cost. The Mechanicus and their accursed champions in the Legio Maledictis were defiant, indefatigable foes.

  If astropathic premonitions were accurate, the Imperium’s battlefleets en route would present unbreakable might. Here, the forces of the Throne sensed their chance to bring the Despoiler to justice. Navigators and other psychically-sensitive souls among the Chaos fleet told of a great wave of pressure rolling from the warp, like the thunderheads of a coming storm. Every warrior within the Warmaster’s armies knew this for what it was. A convergence of warp routes, the way a fleet of ships would drive waves of water before their prows. Invisible currents within the Sea of Souls lashed at the Crythe Cluster as countless Imperial vessels burned their engines hot to defend the forge world and avenge the worlds already fallen.

  It all came down to Seventeen-Seventeen.

  Crythe Prime had to be taken.

  The endgame had begun.

  The Night Lords of 10th Company’s remnants were tasked with making up part of the spearhead in the initial assaults. Alongside them would be their kin from the Hunter’s Premonition.

  With masses of traitorous Imperial Guard now siding with the Warmaster, along with the penal legions harvested from Solace, the Night Lords of Hunter’s Premonition and the Covenant of Blood had a handful of foundries and fortress-factories marked as objectives.

  The Black Legion, far outnumbering the Night Lords contingent, was assigned to larger numbers of similar factorum objectives. Talos no longer detected any obvious signs of the Warmaster seeking to bleed the VIII Legion ahead of his own troops.

  Necessity stole any such favouritism.

  First Claw’s arming chamber was a hive of activity.

  Serfs and servitors attached armour into place, machining it closed and sealed. Septimus was one of them, checking the joint seals of Talos’s armour, ignored by the Astartes as they spoke.

  Cyrion held his arm out as a servitor attached his vambrace and gauntlet. Everyone in the room caught a glimpse of the new augmetic limb, its metal surface a dull, oceanic grey, still uncovered by synth-flesh. Soon enough, the naked steel and titanium arm was armoured in the midnight blue of his battle plate.

  Weapons were blessed and honoured. Oaths were sworn. Spinal sockets were penetrated by the invasive connection needles of power armour locking into place. Vision was tinted murder-red by helms descending over faces.

  ‘I have not seen Octavia since long before her surgery yesterday,’ Cyrion ventured. ‘How does our Navigator fare, artificer?’

  Septimus did not look over from where he was fastening an oath scroll to Talos’s shoulder. The parchment was the white of fresh cream, detailing in Talos’s flowing Nostraman handwriting all of the mission objectives, and his blood-sworn promises to succeed in each one. Oaths of Moment like these were no longer common within the Legion. Xarl also wore one, but Mercutian, Uzas, Cyrion and Adhemar abstained from the tradition.

  ‘She is well, Lord Cyrion,’ said Septimus. ‘I expect she is with Navigator Etrigius again. They spend much time in discussion. They… often argue, apparently.’

  ‘I see. My thanks for the work you did on my bolter.’ As he spoke, he held the weapon up, looking over it as he cradled the weapon in his gauntlets. The name ‘Banshee’ was written upon its side in swirling Nostraman script.

  ‘A pleasure to serve, Lord Cyrion.’

  ‘How is the void-born? Is she well?’

  Septimus froze as he checked the rivets of Talos’s shoulder guards. ‘The… the what, Lord Cyrion?’

  ‘The void-born. How is she?’

  ‘What’s this now?’ Uzas asked, suddenly interested.

  ‘She is a mortal, brother. Beneath your concern,�
� said Cyrion.

  ‘She is… well, thank you, Lord Cyrion.’

  ‘Good to hear. Don’t look so surprised, we’re not all blind to the goings on of the ship. Take her my regards, will you?’

  ‘Yes, Lord Cyrion.’

  ‘Did she like her gift?’ asked Talos.

  Septimus forced himself not to freeze again. ‘Yes, lord.’

  ‘What gift?’ Uzas sounded irritated to be excluded.

  ‘A Legion medallion,’ said Talos. ‘This mortal is treasured by some of the crew. Apparently, treasured enough to warrant my protection.’ Talos turned to Septimus again, and the slave’s blood froze. ‘Without my permission.’

  ‘Forgive me, master.’

  ‘I heard holes were drilled into the coin, and she wears it as a necklace,’ Talos continued. ‘Is that desecration, Cyrion? Defiling Legion relics?’

  ‘I think not, brother. But I shall take the matter up with the Exalted. We must be certain of such things.’

  Septimus’s smile was forced, and he swallowed again. He tried to speak. He failed.

  ‘Forgive us a moment’s levity at your expense, Septimus,’ Talos said. He flexed his fists, rotating his wrists, testing the ease of motion. His right gauntlet was definitely stiff. A replacement must be found soon.

  Faroven. Faroven, the brother that Talos saw die in a dream. From his body, would the new gauntlet come.

  His end cannot be far away now.

  Cyrion clamped his bolter to his thigh on its magnetic coupling. ‘Aye, it’s been a long time since we were mortal. Strange how you forget how to joke.’

  Septimus nodded again, unsure if even now Cyrion was making fun of him, and still far from comfortable with such ‘humour’.

  ‘By the way,’ Cyrion added. ‘Take this.’

  Septimus caught the coin easily, one hand taking it out of the air on its downward arc. It was a twin to Talos’s own coin, silver and marked the same, but for Cyrion’s name in the written runes.

  ‘If you’re going to give mine away and doom me to watching over a ten-year-old girl,’ Talos said, ‘I need to keep you alive somehow.’

  Septimus bowed in deep thanks to both of them, and finished his duties in humbled and confused silence.

  It had taken Octavia barely five minutes to decide that she didn’t like Etrigius at all.

  According to the Covenant’s Navigator, he had known upon first seeing her that he disliked her. This was the kind of fact he found necessary to share.

  Etrigius wasn’t even remotely human anymore. That was little concern to Octavia, and nowhere near as shocking to her as many of the more mundane aspects of life aboard the Covenant.

  She was a Navigator, a scion of the Navis Nobilite, and even if her House name wasn’t worth an iota of respect in the great and wide galaxy, she was still a daughter of humanity’s most precious bloodlines.

  She knew what the Navigator gene did to all of her kind in time. In that regard, sitting with the no-longer-human form of Etrigius was disconcerting, but never truly unnerving.

  Much worse was his penchant for glorifying his own existence.

  These nightly lessons were now her duty – he’d made that clear the first time he’d demanded her presence weeks before – but they were far from pleasant.

  Etrigius’s domain was the antithesis of the gloom that pervaded the Covenant’s innards the way blood ran through a body’s veins. He claimed a modest chamber close to the ship’s massively-armoured prow, and bathed the room in oppressive white light from glow-globes mounted on the walls. Octavia found the brightness hard to bear after the ship’s dark halls. Her warp eye remained covered, but her human eyes wept stinging tears each time she came to visit the other Navigator in his den. The illumination of false sunlight after a month of night.

  ‘Can you dim these lights?’ she asked the first time she’d been granted admittance by Etrigius’s robed slaves.

  ‘No,’ he said, seeming to muse. ‘I dislike the dark.’

  ‘It might be said that you’re on the wrong ship.’

  Camaraderie had threatened to bloom between them at that moment. They had one thing in common that no other soul shared. Yet instead of a unity forming, they’d quickly descended into bickering and vague tolerance.

  Etrigius’s attendants – not one of them unaugmented and younger than sixty – admitted her to ‘the master’s gallery’. The title was appropriate. An entire wall was taken up with pict screens reflecting dozens of views from different points of the ship’s outer hull. As it was, the screens showed the rest of the Warmaster’s battlefleet, and the world the Covenant orbited.

  In the warp… the screens would come into their own. Octavia had to admire the wish to see every angle of the ship as one guided it through the sea of souls.

  The rest of the chamber was much less admirable. And much less tidy. Clothes were piled here and there, strewn across the floor, as well as jewellery. When she’d first entered, her boot had crunched a golden earring into the ground. Etrigius, thankfully, hadn’t noticed.

  Octavia suspected Etrigius had been handsome at one point. If not handsome, then at least well-presented. Before his service in the Great Crusade and the century of chronological time since. She formed this opinion from his voice and bearing, both of which remained cultured and polite despite his many other changes from the near-human he’d been at birth.

  His skin was grey. Not the wan tone of a sunless existence, nor even the pale grey of the dead or the dying. It was grey the way a deepwater shark’s belly was grey: fish-like but unscaled, thick, completely inhuman.

  His fingers were almost armoured in gold and ruby, such was the number of rings he wore. Octavia was no expert, but what confused her was that the rings varied in quality from the exquisitely valuable to the almost worthless. What seemed to be the only common factor was that each ring was a shade of red set in a mounting of gold.

  The Navigator’s many-ringed thumbs and fingers each possessed an extra joint. Octavia would lose track of what she was saying if she got lost in their eerie, hypnotic, curling movements. Fingernails more akin to a feline’s claws sickle-curved from the tips of Etrigius’s grey fingers. These he used to stroke the tattered leather of his observation couch, forever seeming to engineer new splits in the material.

  The rest of Etrigius’s body was masked by a robe of the same deep blue favoured by the Legion’s warriors. His domed head was smooth enough for Octavia to be sure no hair ever grew there, and his ‘human’ eyes were always masked in pressurised goggles with thick clear lenses, featuring some strange violet fluid swirling within. She’d asked what the liquid in his lenses was, asked how he even saw through the murk, but he’d deigned not to answer. Etrigius did that a great deal. Evidently, he only answered topics he found worthy of discussion.

  ‘They have freed your warp eye,’ he murmured, with something resembling awe.

  She touched the bandana tied around her forehead. ‘I think they must be coming to trust me. I mean, after I took the name… After Talos saved me…’

  ‘I was not informed of this. Why was I not told you were to be unblinded?’

  ‘Is it any of your business?’

  ‘I am the Navigator for the Covenant of Blood. Any issue pertaining to the warp is within my purview.’

  ‘I’ve been sitting here an hour listening to you. You only just noticed the metal was gone from my forehead?’

  ‘This was the first time I have bothered to face in your direction,’ he said, and it was true enough. Etrigius was not enamoured of eye contact.

  ‘I am tired of feeling helpless on this ship,’ she said, more to herself than to him.

  Etrigius smiled, for once, with apparent sincerity. ‘Do not expect that to fade, girl.’

  She watched him in silence for several moments, hoping he would continue.

  ‘We are at once slaves and slavemasters,’ he said. ‘Enslaved, yet valuable beyond measure.’ Etrigius gestured to the screens, displaying the Chaos fleet orbiting C
rythe. ‘Without us, these traitors are crippled. Their endless crusade could never be fought.’

  Octavia’s gaze never left the grey man’s.

  ‘Did you choose this life?’

  ‘No. And neither will you. But we will both live it, all the same.’

  ‘Why would I wish to seal myself away in here?’ she countered.

  ‘What Navigator can be satisfied without a vessel to guide?’ The words left his lips with a sickeningly condescending sense of kindness.

  Octavia shook her head without realising she was even doing so. An unconvincing denial, truly no more than an instinctive need to say no.

  Etrigius smiled that same smile. ‘You hunger to sail the stars, as we all do. It’s in the blood. You can no more hide that desire than you can hide the need to breathe. When the time comes, when the Astartes ask you to guide them… you will say yes.’

  Octavia once more felt the potential for a connection between them. She could have used that moment to ask for revelations about navigating the warp without using the guiding light of the Emperor’s Astronomican. She could have said any one of a hundred things to bridge the gap between herself and her fellow Navigator.

  Instead, she rose to her feet and left.

  A cold-blooded sense of inevitability had stolen her tongue.

  When Septimus found her, she was in Blackmarket.

  In the Covenant’s mortal decks, a communal chamber linked many of the individual halls and quarters, and as the Great Crusade played out across the galaxy, the Legion’s loyal servants and slaves came to use the chamber as a trading post and a place to gather. The black market, as it was back then, derived its name from the perpetual darkness of the chamber, only marginally dispelled by lamp packs and glow-globes. Even with a full crew in better days, the mortal decks had endured the same scarce illumination as they did now.

  Fifty or so people crowded the chamber. His status ensured he received respectful nods or greetings from most of them, even from the clusters of rival gang emissaries here to trade for ammunition and power packs. Here, in all its shadowed glory, was a microcosm of fallen Nostramo, born afresh in the blackness.