The Voidfather’s Will
The ship moved off with murderous purpose. The ebullient, eager swagger of the Indomitable Soul was a direct contrast to the stalled, ponderous grief that shrouded the Wyrmslayer Queen, but the Lamertine flagship let its engines burn hard as it pushed itself back towards the battle proper.
The cohesion that had defined the Radrexxus in attack and defence seemed to have fragmented. Ships weaved through the Astraneus fire, void shields blazing and hulls aflame. They responded erratically, unable to focus their attentions. They were distracted children, milling around as though the fight had left them, and all they could muster was petulant flailing – the merest memory of ordered battle.
Only the Lustful Paradox maintained any form of integrity. Its shields still held and its guns still fired as it turned apart. It strutted, diving like a monarch of battle through the heart of the void war. It had shrugged off its tattered air of hedonistic disdain, and was instead a barbed weapon at the hands of its captain. Gunther had been an object of derision, yes, but there was a fearful competence that had been plain even in his days of deception. Then he had merely been a serpent in the trappings of a sybarite. Now, he was revealed as a monster playing at being human.
The Paradox still moved with its sinuous, effortless fluidity, plunging through the lines of battle. Hunting. Its movements were controlled, lacking the erratic spasm of its fellows.
At its bridge, its captain held control by will alone. Gunther Radrexxus threw his head back against the high back of the command throne, leaving trails of sweat along the intricate etchings. None of it mattered. There was only the moment, only the struggle and the dance of competing intelligences.
The broodmind writhed, wounded. The magus, dear Euryale, was gone. One minute she had burned, stellar-bright, and then she had been snuffed out. Maximillian too… though his command had been lesser. The sanctus was only ever a tool, a specialised implement. An expression of the Voidfather’s spite. The weight of the broodmind, the burden of its control, had fallen upon Gunther like a hammer blow. Even now, he could feel the blood dripping from his nose, pounding in his temples.
‘Voidfather,’ he hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Grant me your strength, which endures even in the vacuum of space. Grant me your clarity, which cuts through the confusion of the cattle-mind.’ His mind sought that clarity, questing after certainty once more. Thousands of voices clamoured at his senses, slamming down upon them like waves upon the shore. His will was being scoured away, eroded by the oceans of unbound thought.
However did you endure this weight? His thoughts sought Euryale again, unaccustomed to the loss. The effort made him wince. He could feel drool on his chin, streaked with blood as it dribbled sluggishly. He blinked, trying to regain some measure of self.
‘Deliver your children, Father! Ease our burden! I would walk through all the fires of conflict for you, I would face down any foe… This weight was not mine to bear, not alone.’ He whimpered, despite himself. Even the greatest master of humanity was as nothing before the glory of divinity’s own avatar.
He felt the psychic agony abate, and looked up. He wiped his mouth and nose with the back of his hand, smearing his shame into the sleeve.
The biological is merely the conduit for the supernal; from the flesh shall we be delivered when the Starborne raise us up. We shall be exalted.
Catechism bled into his mind, and in its wake he could feel the comforting presence of the Voidfather. He caressed Gunther’s brainstem with claws of cold fire, and every nerve caught alight and came alive with the old skill and confidence. He almost laughed, but it caught in his throat, stillborn under the eye of a god.
‘I…’ He hissed. ‘I understand.’ There was a flow to his thoughts now, an unspooling web of crude and direct communion. Something had been wrung from it, some subtlety and nuance. All human emotion had ebbed away, replaced by the singular will and drive of their godhead. Now it was the purr of a caged beast, rife with eagerness and pitiless, boundless hunger. It hungered, and it hated.
Gunther hunched deeper into the shadows of the throne, and the bridge crew drove themselves deeper into their frenzy. They worked the controls passionately, lips in constant motion as they tried in vain to process the ceaseless rush of alien malevolence. The ship burned hard, driving through the heart of the battle and out again, towards the inner system. An arrow of burning, tarnished perfection, arcing out towards its allies – enough to draw the eyes of the three wounded giants that had set themselves against it.
As the will of the Voidfather clenched around his mind, Gunther smiled. There was glory to be won here, yet, with divine winds at their back.
Erastus had not expected the Radrexxus gambit to be so obvious, so direct. He could only watch, transfixed and horrified, powerless as the events unfolded around them. He had sought communion with Katla to better coordinate their resistance, and had instead found another voice responding.
‘My mother…’ the voice said through the storm of static, and it took Erastus a moment to recognise it as Astrid’s. As she spoke, the strength behind the voice slowly returned – a guttering flame stirred again to its full intensity. ‘My mother is gone. The beast cut deep, deeper than we might ever have feared. The flagship is lost… She will not make the journey.’
‘Astrid, I’m sorry.’ Erastus closed his eyes. The loss of the jarl and her ship was an almost mortal blow.
We are all orphans now. Bereft of parents, and with our allies all but lost.
Everything was madness. The ship shook and screamed. The hololiths blazed like stars, crimson lancing against their meagre signals. The Lustful Paradox drove at them, seemingly uncaring for its own well-being. Combined fleet fire chased at it, casting up sheets of flame as its void shields caught alight once more. It barrelled past its own ships, who moved sluggishly out of its way only to wheel about in its wake. The Paradox drew the chaff into its orbit, and speared onwards. The Soul began to turn, broadsides scouring across the side of the enemy flagship as it hurtled past.
The Remembrance of the Throne lumbered after its fleeing prey, a looming shadow propelled upon pillars of silver fire. The Arch-Lecter did not broadcast their intent; instead the vox boomed with warlike orisons and declarations of pious fury for those who had lain with the alien and taken up its foul taint. If they heard Erastus and Astrid’s communications, they ignored them. Prow-mounted lances seared the void behind the Paradox, scouring some of the faded brass and ragged gold from its rear. The opulence of finer days was being slowly eroded, discarded like the pupal casing that it had been. In their treachery they were revealed, and exalted.
The Remembrance rushed on too eagerly, and too rashly. By the time the auspex began to sound, it was already too late.
The Paradox flipped, end over end. Retro-boosters fired to stabilise it, straining to contain the monumental shift in the vessel’s weight. Behind it, out of the darkness of the inner system, out of the shadows of the vast turning orbs of the planets, they came.
Gunther gritted his teeth till blood stained them. So many new minds burned with his own, singing over and over through the shared psychic bond. He collapsed to his knees, euphoric as he connected with so many other consciousnesses. He felt what they felt, saw what they saw. He was a mote in the eye of the universe, and he surrendered.
Ships drifted and listed, their engines struggling and straining as they pushed themselves beyond means and ability. Men and women froze at their stations, as air and heat bled out of them. They held failing power conduits together until their skin burned and the electricity finally earthed through them into the decking, and they fell dead. The weakest, the most sure of death, fed themselves into the furnaces that sustained their sputtering engines – the better to ensure that their objectives would be met. A crude fanaticism replaced their earlier nuanced zealotry. The mind that drove them on was devoid of sentiment; all it desired was the death of its enemies. All other things were inconsequential, least of all the lives of those who served it. The Voidfather drove them, fuelled them, animated them.
The makeshift flotilla was varied, formed of all the ships that could conceivably have served a fortress-world in ways beyond combat. Repurposed tugs and skiffs surged forward in ragged attack runs, focused upon the Astraneus flagship.
Its guns lit up, reducing the first wave to so much slag and spinning debris. Flaming metal tumbled off into the void or was obliterated against the shields. Still the vessels came on, forcing themselves forward through the suppressing fire cast up by the Remembrance. Shrapnel rained down against the hull, and the ships pushed onwards like knives, violating the noble vessel. They swarmed it, stealing all momentum. Explosions rocked it, rippling through its body in cataclysmic waves of devastation. The artful etched script across the hull’s exterior was burned away: entire chapters of scripture broke apart as the ship spun, torn by the contradictory forces of the deluge of vessels. Some buried themselves in the ship and pushed, engines struggling as they began to move the vast craft. Others slammed against it and then veered off, committing themselves to ruin.
And behind it all, like the heartbeat of a god, Gunther could feel-hear-sense the great guns of Endymica as they committed themselves at last to renewed slaughter. He felt he could almost taste the detonations of nova-shells and long-range ballistics as they hurtled past the makeshift flotilla. New blades seeking throats. By all the myriad ways of war and betrayal would they render the enemy down, destroy them, and make them weep.
The Lustful Paradox dived through the fire, lending its own broadsides to the death spasms of the great ship, in a final spiteful flourish. Shells burst against the leviathan’s shields, and lances gouged vast glowing chasms through its hull. The other ship was still fighting, still struggling, but the weight of multitudes drowned it, pulled it under and held it in place. They were killing it by degrees, turning every facet of their lives – even their deaths – into barbed weapons that would destroy the enemy and make them suffer.
The Paradox left them behind, ignorant of all save the need to avenge itself. The guiding light of the cult cut and hewed at the minds of its servants, driving each loss into the meat of their brains with bestial potency. The magus, taken from them. Their noble sanctus, cut down. All would be avenged, when the moment came.
When the time came, it would come in fire.