SHIP OF THE DEAD
1
Crossing the Great Rift killed five thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one of the crew. Whole districts of spinal battlements were ripped from the ship’s back. The void shields could not be rekindled. The warship’s superstructure groaned around us as if imbued with miserable life.
Living within these bent steel bones, we laboured on, illuminated by the throbbing red of emergency lighting. The industrial sounds of repair work echoed through every corridor and chamber. Between the metallic crashes, we heard the chanting of choral prayers invoking the Emperor, the Machine-God, and His Reborn Son.
In the silence between the prayers, we heard weeping.
For four days and eleven hours after we emerged, we drifted in the deep void, crippled and cold. No one was permitted to look out into space, where the thrashing madness of the Great Rift still sought to encircle us. Those who broke this edict were executed to spare the rest of us their raving. I killed some of them myself.
When the Motive Force of the ship’s drive was reawakened in the twelfth hour of the fourth day, the air scrubbers clattered back to life in the same moment as the engines. We drew in deep, stale breaths of refiltered oxygen, coughing out the toxin-laden air we’d been sharing amongst ourselves since the power died.
We were alive.
Many were not. Blessings were spoken over the shrouded forms of the fallen, before they were fed to the engine furnaces. In death, they served the warship one last time – this time as fuel.
No one among us was unscathed, but we were alive. Alive, and on the Nihilus side of the Great Rift. It took fifty-two days to run the Straits of Epona through the Rift and it almost cost us the ship, but we had survived. We’d left the Imperium behind.
There was no going back. The ship would never hold together for a return voyage. My master gave the only order he could give.
‘Set course for Nemeton.’
2
Our vessel was the Sword-class frigate In Devout Abjuration, with an initial crew complement of twenty-four thousand, six hundred and ninety souls. We numbered just over two-thirds of that figure after the casualties of crossing the Great Rift and the shipboard riots that followed.
Exile. That was the word my master used for the mission. The notion filtered through the diminished crew, perhaps by virtue of the fact it was true. What hope did we have of seeing home again? In Devout Abjuration set sail with a full human and servitor crew, but the absence of other Space Marines was a telling sign. The Chapter Master, most noble Nisk Ran-Thawll, was already risking a warship and an officer travelling one of the rare routes through the Great Rift. He wouldn’t commit more warriors into the abyss, not when our chances of survival were so low.
Amadeus held absolute command over the warship, but its day-to-day running was overseen by Flag-Captain Harjun Engel, one of the highest-ranking serfs within the Mentor Legion. When my master remarked on the slow pace we set, Engel patched the Navigator’s murmuring voice through to the bridge:
‘There’s nothing here. Nothing. Nothing here. We drift in the dark. All I see are reflections of the Emperor’s Light, cast on the sides of shadows.’
Amadeus mused for five seconds, an eternity to his enhanced cognition, seeking an appropriate reply. Doubtless he considered the Navigator’s words to be uselessly flamboyant language. He craved precision. When people embellished their words, it introduced the possibility of flawed interpretation, and unclarity was something my master took pains to avoid at all costs. Sailors, however, are always prone to such poesy. They operate in a realm without easy definition, on scales beyond comfortable reach of the human mind.
‘Given the nature of our journey,’ Amadeus replied, ‘I will tolerate these inexact sentiments.’
With that, he left the command deck. He didn’t acknowledge the bows and crisp salutes performed by the crew as he passed their stations. Every one of the warship’s complement was lifebound to the Chapter. Each one wore the red eagle of the Mentors somewhere upon their robe or uniform. In this they were no different to Kartash, Tyberia and I. Only avenues of expertise and degrees of training separated us from them. Along with Captain Engel, we were the most valuable humans on the ship.
Even after crossing the Rift, we were anything but safe. There was no Astronomican for the Navigator to sail by. No stable warp routes to follow. We jumped in fits and bursts, plunging blindly into the warp, fearing each stab into the blind unknown would be our last.
The ship shrieked around us, day and night, night and day.
3
My master was the only soul immune to the horror that gripped the ship. He immersed himself in his duties, focusing on nothing but the mission ahead. When Amadeus wasn’t training, he studied in preparation for his assignment, and archived his observations with one of his helots.
This was usually Kartash. Of the three of us, Kartash was closest to him, though that’s a relative description, for we were nothing but tools to Amadeus. He considered our individuality no differently than he considered the scratches on the casing of his boltgun, or the chip along the edge of his relic blade: minor divergences that marked them as his possessions, but functionally no different to similar weapons of war. We didn’t resent this, nor did we fight it. We were slaves, trained far beyond the skills of most other humans, but slaves nonetheless. His attitude to us was entirely natural, in keeping with our lifelong training.
Amadeus barely slept. A four-hour slumber cycle was mandated for his kind when they endured their gruelling training rituals, this figure being the rigorously researched duration required to rest overworked muscle tissue and the chem-stimulated transhuman brain. He could survive for weeks with only minutes of true sleep, resisting the build-up of somnolent toxins in his bloodstream, but that was a matter of necessity, not optimisation.
Amadeus slept for exactly two hundred and thirty-nine minutes each day cycle in the habitation cell allotted for his use. To sleep for that long was an indulgence, one he considered practically slovenly despite the mandate inscribed in his fragmented translation of the Codex Astartes. Laxity was anathema to him.
He balanced his unaccustomed idleness by committing to an even stricter training regimen than the traditional fifteen hours a day. I never once saw him cease early. When he ate his portions of nutrient-rich gruel at the assigned hours each day cycle, his sweat-bathed, abused body cried out for nourishment. I knew this as well as he did, for I monitored his biostability data at all times. There was never a moment I didn’t have his vital signs ticking along, scrolling down the inside of my left eye.
He trained with blade and boltgun, shadow-sparring and dry-firing through hour after hour of training exercises. He pushed himself through physical challenges and cardiomotivator repetitions that would rupture mortal muscle. He fought squads, hordes, armies of holo-ghosts. He ordered me to ritually drain his blood to weaken him before one training session in every five, forcing greater effort and endurance in response. He ran for mile after breathless mile every day through the ship’s labyrinthine innards. I watched the data-spikes as he repeatedly pushed his primary heart to the limit, forcing his secondary heart into overworked life alongside it.
He considered this regimen, in his own words, ‘earning the luxury of sleep’.
We trained as well, as was our duty, but nowhere near to the degree set by our lord.
One day, he told me to shoot him. We stood in the chambers we used for hololithic combat, though today we were focusing on close-quarters battle with blades and gunstocks. Our weapons were loaded with live ammunition to maintain exact weight, as we would feel in the field. Precision was our Chapter’s watchword.
Amadeus entered at the close of our session, considering the three of us as we stood in a loose pack. We were exhausted from two hours of training, slick with perspiration, weighed down by our armour and weapons. Sweat stung my eyes to the degree that even blinking was a relief. We bowed at our master’s approach. He was unarmed and unarmoured.
‘Helot Secundus,’ he said. ‘Shoot me.’
‘Master, with respect, our ammunition is live.’
My mistake was in hesitating, for he shook his head and looked to Tyberia.
‘Helot Tertius. Shoot me.’
Tyberia didn’t hesitate as I had. She levelled her shotgun and fired – or she would have done, had Amadeus not slapped the barrel aside in a blur of motion and thrown her to the floor. The back of her head struck the deck with a jarring smack.
She’d moved fast, faster than any unaugmented human could possibly move, yet Amadeus stood above her, his boot on her throat.
Space Marines have a way of moving, a physicality to their merest motions, which arises from the power inherent in their form. In some, it’s an effortless and unintentional arrogance. In others, a brutal and knowing grace. It’s power, one way or another, and a natural byproduct of the transhuman condition. They can’t help what they are, any more than they can help the myriad ways it shows in whatever they do.
Amadeus radiated that power then, as he pinned Tyberia with no effort at all. He was too cold to be truly arrogant, for arrogance is born in considering how you appear in the eyes of others. Our master had no such concerns. He didn’t revel in his invincibility, he just lived it. Overwhelming physical strength was as natural to him as breathing was to me. Since achieving his place in the Mentor Legion, he’d ascended above mortal concerns. He could exert his will on the world purely by strength and weaponry.
I’ve lived my life around the Emperor’s Angels, and that perception of the world leaves a mark on their psyches. It would for any being in the same circumstances. That unrivalled ability to act, to change the world around them through a level of violence no other individual can match alone… It makes some warriors proud, it shifts others’ perceptions without them realising, and it can easily ripen into something darker beneath the surface. Things like that can fester.
That day, Amadeus’ review of Tyberia’s response amounted to three words.
‘Acceptable. Keep training,’ he said, and left us alone.
Included in our master’s reflections were his brief considerations of his three helots. He noted that the Chapter had assigned him three ‘efficient and diligent’ slaves for this operation. Though he rarely made specific references to any of us, he added a postscript regarding Kartash. One that matched my own perceptions.
‘I find his piety an olfactory irritant at times,’ Amadeus dictated, speaking of Kartash as if all three of us were not present, as if we weren’t the ones recording his words for the Chapter archives. ‘My Helot Primus carries the scent of blessed weapon oils and sacred incense with an intensity that becomes almost cloying.’
I had noticed this. The holy scent permanently wreathed my fellow slave like an aura, and I’d wondered if there was some sin or chastisement in his past that necessitated this effort at holiness. Tyberia, in her cringing way, insisted it must have been a dark sin indeed, and regarded our superior helot with naked suspicion, as if his secret crime were contagious. Kartash, with infinite patience, assured us that it was a matter of simple devotion. I wondered if he had once held aspirations of priesthood, but when I asked, he gave a sad smile and said no more.
Amadeus disregarded the matter as meaningless. It didn’t affect our competence, and thus it was tolerable.
4
It took a further forty-three days before we reached Nemeton – a journey that would have taken mere hours before the rise of the Great Rift extinguished the Emperor’s Light. More of the crew died. Dozens, then hundreds, and eventually thousands. Some starved when the botanical laboratories rotted. Some were poisoned by tainted water when the aquapurifiers failed time and again. Some killed themselves when they realised how far from the Emperor’s gaze we truly were.
Because of our rank among the most valuable humans aboard the vessel, we were protected from privation. Amadeus wouldn’t let us die. Yet the innards of our warship became a necropolis. I organised funerary teams to gather the bodies and, for a time, in the name of purity, the shipboard furnaces burned flesh and bone as often as promethium fuel. Soon enough the dead were reprocessed as nutrient pastes for those of us that still lived. I don’t need an eidetic recollection to remember that foul flavour. Sometimes I still wake with the taste in my mouth.
In Devout Abjuration stank like a charnel house. The air scrubbers couldn’t filter out the funeral pyre reek. Even Kartash’s holy incense, so pervasive in our communal chambers, was often overwhelmed by the smoky stench throughout the ship.
When at last we drifted into the Ophion System, a sensation that was too weary to be called relief spread through the remaining crew. As the final day of our journey dawned in the light of Nemeton’s weak blue sun, our survivors numbered only ten thousand, one hundred and seventy.
At the system’s very edge, the Emperor’s Spears strike cruiser Hex drifted into our engagement zone, its cityscape’s worth of weaponry rolling to bear on the far smaller frigate limping into their territory. She was haloed by fighter wings that painted the void with needle-thin plasma contrails, and was escorted by two destroyers, each one a match for the Abjuration in its own right.
The Hex had been waiting for us. Deep-void satellites and monitoring outposts had evidently marked our approach weeks before our arrival. She demanded that we follow her in towards Nemeton, where we would be boarded and our vessel inspected.
‘If you refuse,’ her captain informed us, ‘you will be destroyed. If you raise your shields or run out your guns, you will be destroyed. If you seek to leave the system, you will be destroyed. Do you understand these terms?’
We understood.
‘Will you comply?’
We complied.