Amidst the Ashes of Ambition
The ships burst from the empyrean in a rush of unlight, as reality shuddered and spasmed and then finally tore open. It was an orderly progression; not the mad tumble of vessels into the real that had blighted Ghrent. There was reason behind it, the culmination of a thousand Imperial prayers for safe passage and sane transit. Crewmen went to their knees, weeping and thankful. It did not matter that they were sworn to the Lamertine Dynasty, thralls of the Helvintrs, or newcomers from the liberated ships of Noatun. Each of them was, in their own way, grateful to have lived.
The Radrexxus ships were quiet, contemplative. There was no revelry or excess, no exultations over the vox. There was only silence. Some thought it an omen, that the most boisterous voices had suddenly turned introspective. It spoke, they claimed, to the gravity of the situation. The long journey through the warp, the betrayal, the battles to see them to their promised end. It had all taken its toll upon the Radrexxus. The mask of bemused, intoxicated indifference had begun to slip – if not to crack entirely.
The ships entered formation, with the Lamertine vessels pushing to the fore and the Helvintr close behind them. The Radrexxus ships were spreading out, forming a sprawling rearguard. Every weapon was primed, and every shield was raised. They did not know from which quarter their enemy would strike, or if any strike would come.
They would not risk being caught unawares again.
‘Auspex returns, my lord,’ Kaddas said quietly as he hunched over his station. The din of the command bridge faded as he focused, intent upon the mass of contradictory signals flooding through the console. Lights flickered and danced, birthed and dying in moments. He followed them as best as he was able, but could only watch as the fluctuating readings slipped away from him. ‘There are a great many signals. More than the manifests of the Norastye would suggest them capable of.’
‘Disposition?’ Erastus asked.
‘They are spread out, vastly so. It’s almost as though…’ Kaddas trailed off. Erastus looked at him. He had never seen the man look so affected. His fingers, white-knuckled, clung to the edges of the console.
‘As though what?’ There were chimes as messages came in from across the fleet, the insistent barks for attention. Erastus ignored them.
‘It… it looks like a debris field,’ said Kaddas. ‘My lord, some great calamity has taken place here.’
Erastus turned and strode from the bridge as quickly as he was able.
Standing on the observation deck was a study in horror.
Erastus was not alone in his shock or his outrage. Many others had been there immediately after translation, when the heavy warding shutters had rolled back to reveal the tranquil void in place of the warp’s corroding madness. Relief had quickly turned to horror at what lay before them.
The void was filled with corpses. The macro-scale ruins of murdered ships spun in the cold darkness, orbited by flocks of slowly turning human cadavers. Ship-death was visceral, traumatic in a way that few other things were. To have your entire world upended, ripped open, the very air prised from your lungs. To be unable even to scream, as death took you. Every void-sailor feared it, the darkly intimate shadows of hull breach, reactor failure, boarding torpedo…
That these ships were recognisable was worse, even if they had been the ships of the enemy. The Norastye had proven themselves to be saboteurs, murderers, thieves of glory, but they had not deserved such a fate.
‘What in the name of the Throne happened here?’ Erastus breathed.
‘Victims of their own folly, perhaps?’ murmured Astrid. ‘Turned upon their own as they turned upon us?’
‘Perhaps…’ His hand was pressed to the glass, as though he could take the wrecks in hand and stop their death spirals. He had dreamed of these moments. He had imagined what it would be like to hole the Norastye fleet through and send them tumbling into the orbit of a distant star. He had wanted to see the robed fools and would-be cyborgs of that line die and flail in the void. To show that no matter how much of themselves they reshaped, they would ever be prey to human weakness. Even the true Mechanicus could not escape the foibles of the flesh.
Perhaps I do not hate them as much as I thought? Or perhaps it is the idea of someone taking the revenge that is rightly mine?
Erastus shook his head. In the middle of the storm of metal and bodies, the Steel Amidst Infirmity floated – torn open, innards bared to the stellar winds. Its engines had been carved away from the superstructure, and plasma fires burned along its length. He wondered if Absalom was still enthroned. If he had gone down with the ship, like the captains of Old Terra’s long-vanished oceans. There was a comfort in that thought. To die, so yoked to duty.
Starlight, faint and yellow, caught on the harsh angles of the broken vessels, but it was the other light that concerned him. The Endymica System bled with Rift-light, with the monstrous anger of the Cicatrix Maledictum. Vast sweeping horns of incarnate spite ringed the system, catching it in the warp’s suppurating grasp. It hurt to look at, and he looked away quickly. He let his eyes drift off of it, never letting it gain true purchase. He instead focused again upon the graveyard of the Norastye.
‘The weapon patterns are inconsistent. I can’t quite identify what caused these wounds,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Could be xenos… could be renegades, bearing the touch of the warp. Any weak point in the crossing is a potential vector for attack. The only local power capable of doing this is the fortress-world itself.’
‘Then we should proceed carefully,’ Astrid said from behind him.
He turned, nodded to her, and then turned his attention back to the ravaged fleet.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ she added.
‘It really is.’ He found the Steel Amidst Infirmity again. It was hard to reconcile; that one of the great flagships of the Compact could succumb to any enemy assault.
He could not imagine his own ship being overrun, or the Queen dying to a thousand cuts. Sometimes he forgot about the Wrath, and the idea of Evelyne dying by fire and madness. Had it been hard, at the end? Had she suffered? He closed his eyes, fingers braced against the viewport. He closed them into a fist, drumming his knuckles against it.
‘It should never have come to this. We were meant to come here together, in unity. In brotherhood.’
‘A fine dream,’ she said with a smile. ‘But such things rarely survive first contact with the enemy. You learn that upon the ice of Fenris. Kin and kind are trustworthy only so long as it serves an interest. The tribes might unite in service of a greater cause, or to fight a singular foe, but it does not always last.’
‘The Compact was supposed to be different. Everything my father said about it, made it sound so… romantic. Princes fighting in His name, to advance the very soul of the Imperium.’
Astrid laughed. ‘A fine sentiment,’ she said. ‘A pretty lie to hide ambition. You knew your father, better than most perhaps, and you knew what lay at his heart. What he sought, with every fibre of his being. Service was a part of it, certainly, but there was the hunger for glory. To be remembered. He wished to carve his saga upon the universe’s skin.’
‘He told me, a long time ago, of the importance of stories. How they were the lifeblood of existence. The universe ran on stories, he would say. The libraries he kept were the envy of many scholarly lords. Archive worlds and knowledge-fanes petitioned him for audiences, and for charity. Did you know that?’
‘I did not. Our people disdained written records. The oral tradition is all. Our gothi maintains it – holds all the knowledge of the dynasty, and uses that wisdom to guide our leaders. She advises them directly, and consults the runes to better interpret the wyrd of those who serve.’
They were both, he was suddenly aware, stalling. Unwilling to consider what had come to pass; hiding their unease behind the recitation of family history.
‘It sounds…’ He shuddered as he gazed out at the competing fires. The natural and the unnatural. ‘It sounds almost sorcerous, when you put it like that.’
‘Skitja!’ She spat on the deck. ‘To say such things! It is no more sorcery than the reading of the Tarot!’
He held up his hands. ‘I meant no disrespect. Your ways are not my ways, but they are still the ways of a world of the Imperium. We will face this. Together. United. Send word to your mother, and to Radrexxus – see if we can get an answer. We’re going to have to move decisively, if we want to survive this.’
There was a peculiar calm upon the bridge of the Lustful Paradox, the storm within having long since blown itself out. The music had gone quiet, and the air was not filled with the reek of chemical stimulants. It was still, and tense, primed for action or for sudden movement.
No one moved. They did not look up from their stations, nor cease the clatter of fingers over keys. Hands moved in a blur of motion, completely focused and directed as they took in the information and added it to their comprehension of events. Pale figures glided about the edges of the chamber, pausing every so often to knot their fingers into the hair of an attendant. The questing digits locked tight to their scalps, eliciting soft moans of pain. They convulsed at their stations, collapsing back into their chairs, before the figures moved on, and the cycle repeated itself. Information bled from soul to soul, in a peculiar, cyclical, osmosis.
This, they understood, was necessary. This was the nature of service. The demands of the family Radrexxus. Blood always told, in the end. Blood was what mattered.
At the heart of the silent bridge, Gunther stood. His finery was absent, all ostentation removed as though with a knife. The armour he wore was entirely functional. Angular. Overlapping plates of pale cream and regal purple. His sword was belted at his waist, alongside an ornate pistol.
‘Are we ready?’ he asked simply.
There was a chorus of affirmations, but they were not the approval he sought. He gestured sharply, his fingers cutting the air as surely as any sump-dagger. Servants shuffled forward, misshapen beneath their robes. Some considered them baroque servitors, distasteful affectations. They were neither. They were the worthiest unworthy, and they came to honour him with their touch.
They held bowls, and plunged their hands into them, smearing them with bright pigments. Rough fingers drifted across his temples and down his face, trailing whorls of paint along his pale skin. The usual make-up and rouging had been scraped off, and he wore no wig. His scalp gleamed in the bridge’s lumens, until the questing digits roamed over it and remade his visage in sanctity.
‘Are we ready?’ he repeated. The bridge was silent. The paint-streaked servants crept away, slinking back into the shadows. A stutter of vox-static broke the calm, and a voice responded.
‘We are ready, my lord. Communion proceeds… I can taste them upon the star-wind. They speak with the voice of kin. The seeds have taken root, the fruit is borne in earnest. They have done this thing, offered it up as sacrifice and sacrament! They are joyous, and they call! They call!’
‘Prepare,’ Gunther said. He drew his blade, testing its weight. ‘Maximillian will be needed in the coming tumult. Send word to him. His services are required once more.’
The fleet eased forward into the field of debris, dislodging the larger pieces from their inconstant orbits. Some were shunted out of the way by the passage of the great vessels, flotsam amidst the sea of stars, while others were annihilated outright as they collided with the active void shields. Flashes of light and energy glittered along the length of the ships, like the bioluminescence of deep ocean predators.
‘We do not have to linger on the ice to chase the kraken,’ Katla said softly. ‘It is there, no matter where we go. We have followed it to the stars, and become predators in our own right, and still there is the beast beyond, and beneath.’
Her father’s words. He had always imparted the wisdom of the old world, carried up from the storm-tossed seas of Fenris. Stian had been a fine father, and a better captain. Under his tutelage she had learned much, and been shaped into the woman she was today. She hoped she had imparted as much to Astrid. Her daughter was a ferocious spirit, and a capable warrior. Too trusting, perhaps. Quick to accept the offered hand, without truly suspecting what lay behind it. Intent was everything in the hunt.
‘You will learn,’ Katla said to herself. ‘As we all do.’
She had armed and armoured herself, each plate inscribed with warding marks, sigils of aversion. They would turn aside the strike of a sword or the blow of an axe as surely as they would the touch of sorcery. She stood taller in her armour, bolstered by the strength of ages.
‘No word from the inner system, jarl,’ one of the serfs called. ‘Attempting another sending, but there is yet interference from the wrecks. Beyond that, perhaps they do not wish to listen?’
‘Then they are fools!’ she spat. ‘If they were a loyal world then they would have answered. Either whatever claimed the Norastye has swept down upon them, or they are another nest of traitors as the privateers were!’ She shook her head, eyes wild. ‘I will not be denied again! Raise them, or ready for war!’
Her gaze drifted across the lie of the murdered ships. The signifiers flickered and danced, even as her mind interpreted and divined. She could be right, of course. It could have been some external threat. Some horror… but the kill-patterns suggested otherwise.
Her hand tightened on the haft of her spear. ‘If that is the case then we shall dig whatever foe has done this from their lair, and we shall put them to the torch.’
She tapped the blade of the spear against the side of her throne, before dragging it along its edge. Testing it, as against a whetstone.
‘Take us in, carefully.’ The tapping of the spear was like the beating of a heart, the rhythm underscoring the threat of coming battle. ‘The Norastye were taken unawares. That will not happen to me. No matter what else comes to pass, we shall be ready.’
Gunther closed his eyes and let his mind soar. He remembered Endymica. He remembered every breath of it. Minds called out to minds, and he let his consciousness drift into the sea of will and memory.
It was not a kind world. Even before it had been reshaped to the monumental needs of the Imperium, it had never been kind. Lowlands of dust deserts had given way to snow-wreathed mountains, the cradles of winter storms that wracked the fragile ecosystem with baleful fury.
The hand of man had sheared the mountains down to nubs, and fashioned them into fastnesses – girding the world in iron and rockcrete, pointing the guns ever higher. The stars themselves quaked, so they claimed, beneath their relentless scrutiny. Every resource, every opportunity, had been relentlessly yoked and broken, taken and repurposed by the gluttonous hunger of mankind.
Before ever the Rift had opened, Endymica had been a world transformed.
Time had brought subtler changes to the planet. To the oaths that bound it, and the hand that guided it. Its guns had ceased to be idle, and had instead begun to reap their tally of interlopers and intruders. Some were mere pirates, lesser systems’ warlords who thought them easy prey. Later came lost souls, seeking safe harbour; remembering where the high walls had been raised, and where the defences were the most mighty. They died with hope on their lips and despair in their hearts.
They who dwelt within did not care. They no longer pretended to. The time for masks was long since passed. They had killed and preyed for time out of mind, for one master or another, and now the galaxy changed. It turned, and burned, and all was confusion.
As the psychic aftershocks of warp translation shuddered through the system, and the first auspex readings penetrated the fug of debris and radiation which orbed the Mandeville point, so the first transmissions were sent. They passed from fortress to fortress, and garrison force to garrison force. It built within the structure of the world, until it would no longer be contained. It rang out, loud and clear, a single utterance. A word which carried with it such terrible import, lost in its simplicity.
Endymica spoke, and Gunther’s lips moved in silent sympathy. It spoke, and the word was: ‘Voidfather.’