SIXTEEN

Flagship
Exogenesis
Infiltration

Even after everything that had happened, the betrayal, the massacre and all that came later, the sight of the Vengeful Spirit still had the power to take Loken’s breath away. She was monstrous and beautiful, a gilded engine whose only purpose was to destroy.

‘We should have known it would end this way,’ he whispered, as the image of his former flagship shimmered on the slate.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Rassuah.

‘We set out from Terra to make war,’ said Loken. ‘That’s all. Sigismund was right. The war will never be over, but what else should we have expected when we crossed the stars in ships like that?’

‘It was a crusade,’ said Rassuah. ‘And you don’t set out to reclaim the galaxy with kind words and good intentions.’

‘Ezekyle had a similar argument with Lupercal before we reached Xenobia. He wanted to make war with the Interex straight away. The Warmaster told him that the Great Crusade had evolved, that since the human race was no longer on the edge of extinction the nature of the Crusade had to change. We had to change.’

‘Change is hard,’ said Rassuah. ‘Especially for people like us.’

Loken nodded. ‘We were created to fight, to kill, and it’s hard to change what you were born to do. But we were capable of so much more.’

He sighed. ‘Whatever else we might have achieved, we’ll never get the chance. From now on there is only war for us.’

‘It’s all there is for any of us,’ said Rassuah.

They’d translated into Molech’s system space on the very inner edge of the Mandeville point. A risky manoeuvre, but with a ship as fine as Tarnhelm and a pilot of finesse, it was worth the risk.

The approach to Molech was made in near silence, with Tarnhelm’s systems running at their lowest ebb. A brief burst of powerful acceleration during a moment of sunspot activity hurled the stealth ship towards Molech. Momentum would do the rest.

In the three days since, the pathfinders had spent their time in solitary reflection, preparing their wargear and running through individual preparations. For Rubio that involved meditation, for Varren and Severian the obsessive dismantling and reassembly of weaponry. Voitek and Qruze played Regicide every hour, while Callion Zaven honed the monomolecular edge of his hewclaw blade. Alten Nohai spent his time teaching Rama Karayan a form of martial art that looked curiously peaceful. Only Bror Tyrfingr was restless, pacing the deck like a rutting stag in mating season.

Loken spent the time alone, trying to ignore the shadowed suggestion of a hooded figure in the corner of his bunk-alcove. He knew it wasn’t there, that it was just a memory given form, but that didn’t make it go away.

It spoke to him, though he knew the words were all in his mind.

Kill me. When you see me, kill me.

‘She’s been hurt,’ said Qruze, as the wallowing form of the Vengeful Spirit hovered over the table. He pointed to blackened portions of the hull, impact craters along the spinal fortresses and sagging buttresses made molten by concentrated laser fire. ‘Someone made her pay for victory.’

‘It was a scrappy fight,’ said Varren, pointing out the drifting wrecks of numerous light cruisers and orbital platforms. ‘They got up close and bloody.’

The image of the Warmaster’s flagship was being projected by the device Tubal Cayne had brought. A compact logic engine of some kind, around the size of a small ammo crate. Loken had watched the former Iron Warrior run a portion of the device over the Scyllan shipwrights’ plans in Yasu Nagasena’s villa.

Those schemata were now displayed in three-dimensional holographic form, every structural member and compartment rendered in the finest detail. The image flickered as inloads from Tarnhelm’s forward surveyors updated the ship’s appearance from what had been built to what was approaching.

Tubal Cayne made adjustments to the device, zooming in on various parts of the ship with an architect’s precision. Too quick for the rest of them to follow his working, the former Iron Warrior hunted out weaknesses in the structure, gaps in the defences for them to exploit.

‘Anything?’ asked Tyrfingr, tapping his fingers on the table.

‘Ventral spine on the portside looks good,’ said Severian.

‘If you want to die,’ replied Cayne.

‘What?’ said Severian, his voice low and threatening.

‘Look at the internal structure beyond,’ said Cayne, highlighting a section of transverse bracing. ‘The Vengeful Spirit is Gloriana-class, not Circe. We’d pass too close to a main transit arterial. There will be automated defences here, here and here, with warden-sentinels at these junctions.’

‘I could get past them.’

‘But you’re not doing this alone, are you?’

Severian shrugged and sat back. ‘Where would you suggest?’

‘As I told Loken, the lower decks are always the weakest point in most ships’ defences. Just as I suspected, it’s not presented to the planet below.’

‘So?’ asked Varren.

‘You people,’ said Cayne with a shake of his head. ‘So fixated with putting an axe in someone’s head.’

‘I’ll put one in your head soon,’ said Varren.

‘Why? I am simply telling you of a better way to infiltrate our target.’

‘Explain how,’ said Loken.

Cayne zoomed in on the lower decks, to a portion of the hull ravaged by torpedo impacts and broadsides. From what Loken remembered of those sections, Cayne was showing them dormitory spaces and magazine chambers.

‘These areas on a Scylla-pattern Gloriana were designed for menials, gun-crews and whatever lagan has sunk to the ship’s bowels,’ said Cayne. ‘They are not Legion spaces, so it is highly unlikely any repair work has been undertaken.’

‘That one,’ said Rama Karayan, pointing to an impact crater in the shadow of a collapsed deflector array. Almost invisible, even to Cayne’s device, it was a deep gouge in the Vengeful Spirit’s flank. ‘A wound easily large enough allow Tarnhelm entry.’

‘A good choice, Master Karayan,’ said Cayne.

‘Exload that to Rassuah,’ said Loken.

‘I already have,’ replied Cayne.

Rassuah let Cayne’s device and the motion of Tarnhelm guide her, allowing the ship to feel its way through the maze of destroyers, frigates, system monitors and orbital patrol boats. Cayne’s device was plugged into the ship’s avionics panel and was plotting a constantly-updating route.

The traitor fleet was enormous, many hundreds of vessels moored at high anchor. The bigger ships kept themselves geostationary, but didn’t otherwise move. The light cruisers and destroyers were the ones Rassuah needed to worry about. They patrolled the void above Molech, vigilant hunters and guard dogs all in one. Threat auspex lashed orbital space in search of prey. Even if a search sweep passed right over the Tarnhelm, Rassuah didn’t think they’d sniff out the stealthy infiltrator.

But in case they enemy got lucky, she ghosted the Tarnhelm between scads of orbital junk, keeping as many drifting wrecks between her and the hunters as possible.

Just the kind of delicate, hyper-intricate flying only one schooled and augmented by the surgeons of the clade masters could achieve. Even so, a fine sheen of perspiration beaded her brow.

‘You let me know the instant any of those destroyers so much as changes a micron of its course,’ she said.

Cayne nodded, but gave her a look of patronising indulgence.

She didn’t know exactly what his device was, but Cayne asserted it could pick a path through even the most densely layered defences, and so far it hadn’t let them down. Retroactively-emplaced mines, electromagnetic pulsars and passive auspex had been seeded through high orbit, but the device had sniffed every one of them out and provided course corrections to avoid them.

When she’d asked him where it had come from, all he had said was that it was a confection designed by the Lord of Iron in one of his more introspective moments. She’d laughed at that, telling him she hadn’t figured his primarch being one prone to introspection.

He had looked at her strangely and said, ‘The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards solitude.’

Leaving her with an assurance that the device would function perfectly well without him, Cayne returned to the crew spaces and Ares Voitek had taken his place. While Rassuah would pilot the ship, Voitek would crew its weapons. Any significant weapons’ fire would likely announce their presence as surely as a vox-hail, but better to be prepared. Voitek had plugged into the console, his senses meshed with the passive auspex.

‘Servitor-crewed one-shot,’ he said picking up the active surveyors of a torpedo with an implanted servitor to fire it upon detection of a target. ‘Nine hundred kilometres high on your ten.’

‘I see it,’ said Rassuah, angling their course to avoid its arc of coverage.

‘Overlapping sentinel array dead ahead,’ said Voitek.

‘Can you burn out its auspex with a tight-focus volkite beam?’

‘I can. Generating micro-burst solution.’

‘Ares, wait,’ said Rubio, appearing at the hatch behind them, his face lined with effort. ‘Don’t shoot it.’

‘Why not?’ asked Voitek. ‘I have a perfect firing solution.’

‘Destroy it and you will alert our enemies.’

‘I don’t intend to destroy it, simply blind its main auspex.’

‘It’s not the auspex you need to worry about.’

‘We take this one down and we open the largest gap,’ explained Voitek. ‘The only time these things register with the command ship is when they detect something. Its going dark won’t be noticed.’

‘Open fire and you’ll find out just how wrong it’s possible to be,’ said Rubio. ‘There is a corrupt Mechanicum sentience onboard, something analogous to a Thallax, but tasked only with maintaining a link in an auspex chain. Break that chain and the enemy will know of our presence.’

‘We need that gap,’ said Rassuah. ‘Cayne’s toy can only find a way to the Vengeful Spirit if there’s a gap.’

Rubio nodded and closed his eyes. ‘I will give you your gap, Rassuah. Be ready, Ares. Shoot when I give the word.’

Witchlight hazed Rubio’s eyelids, and his crystalline hood pulsed with corposant. Rassuah felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Rubio’s eyes darted back and forth, as though following a tortuous maze where one wrong turn meant disaster. His lips parted and a breath of frozen mist sighed out.

‘Shoot,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Rassuah didn’t see anything happen. Voitek’s control of the weapons was via an implanted servo-arm and the volkite beam was too quick and too precise. Even so, she held her breath.

Rubio opened his eyes, but his hood still glowed. His skin was pale and he looked like he’d just eaten something unpleasant.

‘What did you do?’ asked Rassuah.

‘I implanted an image of dead space within its polluted mind,’ said Rubio. ‘Voitek destroyed its eyes, but it is seeing what I want it to see. It believes it is still part of the auspex chain.’

‘How long will it believe that?’

‘As long as I keep the image strong in its consciousness,’ said Rubio, holding firm to the door stanchions. The strain of holding false thoughts in a deviant cyborg’s mind was taking its toll.

Cayne’s logister chimed as it registered a newly opened gap and offered up a path. Rassuah was already easing Tarnhelm through with a twitch of manoeuvring jets.

‘Fly steady, and fly smooth,’ cautioned Rubio.

‘It’s the only way I fly,’ Rassuah assured him.

The Vengeful Spirit loomed ahead of Tarnhelm, a vast edifice of black metal, two hundred kilometres and closing. Rassuah shivered at the sight of the Warmaster’s flagship, as though it were a voracious oceanic predator and they a bleeding morsel swimming heedlessly towards it.

Everything about the Vengeful Spirit was threatening.

Each gun port was a snarling maw, every cloistered broadside array a serrated cluster of gargoyles and daemons. The huge amber eyes on its flanks, none smaller than a hundred metres across, were actively staring at her. The blade of its prow was an assassin’s dagger whose sole purpose was to cut her throat.

Rassuah tried to shake off the creeping horror of the vessel. Throne, it was just a starship! Steel and stone, an engine and a crew. She whispered clade mantras to clear her thoughts. She fixed on Tarnhelm’s displays and controls, but always found her gaze dawn back to the Vengeful Spirit’s hellforged eyes.

The impact crater yawned before Tarnhelm like a gateway to the abyss, a black hole into the unknown.

‘Starships have machine-spirits, yes?’ asked Rassuah.

Voitek looked up from the console, his half-machine face showing puzzlement at the timing of her question.

‘A gift of the Omnissiah, yes,’ he said at last. ‘Every complex machine has one bestowed upon it at the moment of its activation. The larger the machine, the greater the spirit.’

‘So what kind of spirit does this ship have?’

‘You know its name, what do you think?’

‘I think that any ship built to rule over a world of toxins and murder has a spirit best avoided.’

‘And yet we must fly into the heart of this one,’ said Voitek as the Vengeful Spirit swallowed the Tarnhelm whole.

They met on an island at the centre of an artificial lake. Reflected moonlight wavered on its gently rippling surface. The location spoke of earlier times in the Legion’s history, before ritual had replaced tradition. When things had been simpler.

Now it seemed that even that simplicity had been a lie.

A flaming spear rammed into the ground at the centre of the island burned with orange light, bathing the features of those assembled in a ruddy glow of health that belied their true condition.

Abaddon’s skin was waxy with regenerative balms and fresh-grafted skin. Noctua now boasted a clicking augmetic for a right hand, while Aximand was supported by a spinal armature while his shattered vertebrae regrew. Only Falkus Kibre had fought the angel of fire and emerged unscathed.

Maloghurst stood with the Mournival, for once looking like the least wounded among them. Ger Gerradon and his growing band of Luperci also gathered to hear of the invasion’s next phase.

‘We have achieved great things, my sons, but the hardest fight is yet to come,’ began Horus, circling the burning spear and placing a hand over the amber eye at his chest. ‘The enemy mass before us, an unbroken host of men and armour stretching all the way to Iron Fist Mountain. Armies from all across Molech are gathering, but they will not stop us from reaching Lupercalia.’

Aximand stepped from the circle.

Of course it would be Aximand. He would have fought the coming battle a hundred times already in his head. Of all his sons, Little Horus Aximand was the most fastidious, the most conscientious. The one whose thoughts came closest to his own.

‘The numbers do not favour us, my lord,’ said Aximand.

‘Numbers aren’t all that decide a battle,’ pointed out Kibre.

‘I know that, Falkus, but even so, we’re outnumbered nearly fifty to one. Perhaps if the Death Guard fought with us…’

‘Our brothers of the Fourteenth Legion are poised to be the anvil upon which the hammer of the Sons of Horus will break the Imperials,’ said Horus.

‘They’ll be with us for the coming fight?’ said Aximand. ‘We can count on that?’

‘Have you ever known Mortarion’s sloggers to fail?’ said Horus.

Aximand nodded, conceding the point. ‘What are your orders?’

‘Simple. We fight for the living and kill for the dead. Isn’t that what you say?’

‘Something like that,’ grinned Aximand.

‘What’s at Lupercalia?’ asked Abaddon, his voice forever burned down to a scorched rasp. ‘What did you learn from the thing in the cave’s death?’

Horus nodded and said, ‘I remembered why the Emperor came here, what He found and why He didn’t want anyone else to know about it. Lupercalia is where I’ll find what we need to win this long war.’

‘So what did it show you?’ asked Aximand.

‘All in good time,’ said Horus. ‘But, first, I have a question for you, my sons. Do any of you know how life began on Old Earth?’

No one answered, but he hadn’t expected them to; the question too far beyond their usual sphere of interaction.

‘Sir?’ said Maloghurst. ‘What does that have to do with Molech?’

‘Everything,’ said Horus, enjoying this rare moment to be a teacher instead of a warrior. ‘Some of Earth’s scientists believed life began as an accidental chemical reaction deep in the oceans around hydrothermal vents. A chance energy gradient that facilitated the transformation of carbon dioxide and hydrogen into simple amino acids and proto-cells. Others believed life came to Earth by exogenesis, microorganisms entombed deep in the hearts of comets travelling the void.’

Horus walked to the edge of the lake, his warriors parting before him. He knelt and scooped a handful of water in his palm. He turned to face his sons and let it spill between his fingers.

‘But that’s not where you and I came from,’ said Horus. ‘As it turns out, our dream didn’t begin on Earth at all.’

This was a part of the ship Loken had never visited. But even if he had, he doubted he would have recognised it. The Tarnhelm sat canted at a shallow angle on a buckled plate exposed to the void. Landing claws held it tight to the deck, and Rassuah kept the engines at their lowest pitch.

Loken led the pathfinders from the ship and into the cratered section of the Vengeful Spirit, his armour gusting puffs of exhaled breath. Feathers of vapour bled from the heat of his armour’s backpack. The sound of his breathing filled his helmet as he crossed the ruptured chamber.

‘Rassuah, once we’re inside, take Tarnhelm out and follow our progress via the armour locators as best you can,’ said Loken. ‘And keep close to the hull. If this goes bad, we’ll need a quick evacuation.’

‘You want me to keep my hunter’s eye in?’ asked the pilot.

‘As best you can.’

‘Count on it,’ said Rassuah, signing off.

Infinite space stretched behind him, an unending black tapestry of emptiness and points of aeons-old light. Before him was the vessel where he’d known his greatest joys and deepest woes.

He was back on the Vengeful Spirit and didn’t know how to feel.

The best and worst of his memories had been shaped in its arming chambers and companionways. He’d known his greatest friends and seen them become his most terrible enemies. Loken felt like a murderer at the scene of his crime, or a tortured shade revisiting the place of his death.

He’d known that returning here would be difficult, but actually being here was something else entirely.

A hand pressed against his left shoulder guard. He’d proudly borne the heraldic icon of the Sons of Horus there. Now it was a blank space, burnished grey.

‘I know, lad,’ said Iacton Qruze. ‘Strange to return, eh?’

‘We called this ship home for the longest time,’ said Loken. ‘The memories I have…’

Qruze tapped a finger to his temple.

‘Remember her as she was, not the beast they’ve turned her into. Everything began on this vessel and everything will end on it. Mark my words, lad.’

‘It’s just a ship,’ said Severian, moving over the crumpled deck. ‘Steel and stone, an engine and a crew.’

Qruze shook his head and followed Severian.

Loken felt old eyes upon him. He told himself it was just his imagination and set off after Qruze. He followed the rest of the team deeper into the cavern blown in the side of the ship.

By the look of its walls it had once been a dormitory space. Now it was an empty void. Every loose piece of apparatus had been explosively vented into space by whatever weapon had torn through the ship’s hull.

‘Transverse impact,’ said Ares Voitek, pointing out tear lines and direction of blast shear. ‘This was a lucky hit, a torpedo brought down by point-defence guns and spiralling away.’

‘I wonder if it felt lucky to the people inside,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Lucky or not, they still died.’

‘They were traitors,’ said Varren, pushing past. ‘How does it matter how they died? They died, that’s enough.’

‘They died screaming,’ said Rubio, a hand pressed to the side of his helmet. ‘And they’d been screaming for a very long time.’

The pathfinders spread out, moving to where the nearest interior bulkhead was still intact. Voitek moved across the wall, his servo-arms tapping and clicking along the bulkhead as though searching for something.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘There is atmosphere on the other side. Cayne?’

‘Setting up now,’ said Cayne.

He placed the same device he’d used to thread the maze of seeded defences surrounding the Vengeful Spirit at Voitek’s feet. A detachable wand connected via a coiled cable snapped out and he panned the wand up and down.

‘You are correct, Master Voitek,’ he said, consulting a softly glowing slate on his device. ‘A passageway, sealed at one end by debris. The shipwright’s plans indicate there is a way through in the other direction, a sub-transit that leads up to an ammunition runnel-path for a lower gun deck.’

‘Will it get us deeper into the ship?’ asked Loken.

‘I already said it would,’ said Cayne. ‘Aren’t you familiar with the layout of sub-decks on the gunnery levels?’

‘No, not particularly.’

Cayne shook his head as he packed up his device and slotted the wand back home. ‘You Luna Wolves, it’s a wonder you were able to find your way around at all.’

Severian drew his combat blade. ‘I can kill him if you want,’ he offered.

‘Maybe later,’ said Loken.

Severian shrugged and leaned forward to scratch a symbol onto the wall, an angular rune of vertical and crosswise lines.

‘You know futharc?’ said Bror Tyrfingr, looking over Severian’s shoulder. ‘How do you know futharc?’

‘What’s futharc?’ asked Loken.

‘Battle sigils,’ said Severian. ‘Scouts of the Space Wolves – sorry, the Vlka Fenryka – use them to guide follow-on forces through void-hulks and the like. Each symbol gives the main host information about what’s ahead, the best routes to take. That sort of thing.’

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

‘The Twenty-Fifth Company served with your lot more than once,’ said Severian, finishing his script. ‘A wolf named Svessl taught it to me.’

‘Something he’ll regret if I ever see him,’ grunted Bror.

Qruze and Rama Karayan moved past Bror and Severian. They began unfolding a blocky series of struts and portable generators from a series of narrow crates that might once have contained rockets for a missile launcher.

This was Karayan’s area of expertise, and he quickly set up what looked like a framed template of a door. With Voitek’s assistance, Karayan hooked his construction to a generator and wound a crank until a gem-light on its side turned green.

Karayan pressed a snap-covered activation switch. A shimmer of liquid energy bloomed around the frame’s inner edges, spreading until it filled the enclosed space like the surface of a soap bubble. It rippled, filmy with rainbow colours.

‘Integrity field established,’ said Karayan. ‘Safe to breach.’

Voitek nodded and his servo-arms reached through the field to grip projections on the bulkhead.

‘Breaching now,’ said Karayan as precision melta-cutters on the back of the frame burned with short-lived, but ferocious intensity. They sliced through the bulkhead instantaneously, and Ares Voitek yanked the cut slab of metal back through the integrity field.

‘We’re in,’ said Varren.

Shock greeted the Warmaster’s pronouncement. Disbelief and confusion. Aximand felt the ground beneath him turn to shifting sand at the truth of the Warmaster’s words.

‘Don’t you feel it, my sons?’ continued Horus. ‘Don’t you feel how special Molech is? How singular among all the worlds we have won it is?’

Aximand found himself nodding, and saw he wasn’t the only one.

Lupercal walked in a circle, jabbing a fist into his palm with every sentence.

‘At the dawn of the great diaspora, the Emperor travelled here in humble guise and found the gateway to a realm of immortal gods. He offered them things only a god-in-waiting could offer, and they trusted Him. They gave Him a measure of their power, and with that power He wrought the science to unlock the mysteries of creation.’

Horus was radiant as he spoke, as though he had already ascended to a divine plane of reality.

‘But the Emperor had no intention of honouring His debt to the gods. He turned on them, taking their gifts and blending them with His genecraft to give birth to demigods. The Emperor condemns the warp as unnatural, but only so no other dares wield it. The blood of the immaterial realm flows in my veins. It flows in all our veins, for as I am the Emperor’s son, you are the Sons of Horus, and the secret of our genesis was unlocked upon Molech. The gateway to that power is in Lupercalia, far beneath the mountain rock. Sealed away from the light by a jealous god who knew that someday one of His sons would seek to surpass His deeds.’

And finally Aximand understood why they had come here, why they had expended such resources and defied all military logic to follow in the footsteps of a god.

This would be the moment they rose to challenge the Emperor with the very weapons He had kept for Himself.

This was to be the apotheosis of them all.

Karayan and Severian led the way, moving into the tangled mess of the corridor beyond the integrity field. Loken and Qruze went next, followed by the others in quick succession. The corridor was dark and cluttered with smashed metal. Only the faint glow of helmet lenses and the occasional spark from fusing machinery lit the way. Debris littered the deck. Ruptured pipes drizzled the air with moisture and vapour.

Loken’s auto-senses tasted it as the stagnant water in a bleak mountain tarn. He heard static like a rasp drawn over stone. Whispers lingered.

The Seven Neverborn. The Whisperheads. Samus. Samus is here…

Loken shook his head to clear the unbidden thought, but it was lodged like a splinter worming its way deeper into his flesh. He saw Rubio reach out a steadying hand to the wall, then flinch as though it were red hot.

Loken focused on Callion Zaven’s back, imagining how it would look blown open with a mass-reactive or chewed up by a chainsword. He wondered if Zaven’s death scream would echo with perfect pitch as he died.

‘Loken?’ said Altan Nohai. ‘Is something wrong? Your heart-rate is elevated.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Loken, the image of murder lingering like the taste of blood. ‘This place, it’s hard being back.’

If the Apothecary heard the lie, he gave no sign. Loken pressed on, hearing the soft breath at his shoulder that he couldn’t possibly be hearing.

They moved down the corridor, reaching a junction of dripping echoes and tangled cabling hanging from the ceiling spaces. Blue sparks spat from a crumpled junction box. An Eye of Horus had been crudely painted on the wall in white. Drip lines made it look as though it was weeping milky tears.

‘Cayne, which way?’

‘As I said, straight on and up the stairs at the end.’

Severian was already moving, bolter pulled in tight. It looked as though his body was utterly still from the waist up. The barrel of his weapon never wavered, never so much as drifted a millimetre from his eyeline.

Moving silently in power armour was a trick only a few could manage, but Severian and Karayan elevated it to an art form. If anything, Rama Karayan moved with even less apparent effort than Severian, mirroring his path as they pushed ahead.

Loken felt clumsy in comparison, every echo of his footfalls sounding like the stomping tread of a Dreadnought. He could see that the others felt the same way.

The scrape of a blade behind him set Loken’s teeth on edge, like an Apothecary’s saw grinding through bone. In deference to Bror Tyrfingr’s displeasure, Severian left the marking of their path to the warrior of the Rout. It would be his gene-sire making this future assault, and the symmetry was pleasing.

Iron stairs were just where Cayne had said they would be, and the pathfinders climbed to one of the ventral gun decks. The top opened into a high-ceilinged chamber of acoustic baffles that sagged from the walls in wadded lumps and filled the air with drifting particulates. Another Eye of Horus on the wall. Loken reached out to touch it. The paint was still wet.

Shielded from the guns’ pressurised venting of superheated propellant by heavy mantlet shutters, the ammunition runnel-path was a sunken roadway ten metres wide behind the ranked-up guns. In battle, a constant stream of flatbed gurneys would ride the rails, distributing shells to the macro-cannon batteries and hauling discarded casings to the smelters.

The guns were silent, but chains rattled in enormous windlasses and the rumble of magazine elevators set the air vibrating. The sour smell Loken had tasted earlier returned, stronger this time. The voices scratching at the edge of hearing like animals left out in the rain became clearer.

‘What is that?’ said Zaven.

‘You hear it?’ asked Loken.

‘Of course, it’s like a part-tuned vox in another room,’ said Zaven. ‘It keeps saying the same thing over and over.’

‘What are you hearing?’ asked Rubio urgently.

‘I don’t know exactly,’ said Zaven. ‘It’s gibberish. Maelsha’eil Atherakhia, whatever that means.’

‘No, it’s not words at all,’ said Varren. ‘It’s screaming. Or maybe someone’s trying to chop a chainaxe through adamantium.’

‘That’s what you hear?’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘Getting hit on the head all those times must have damaged the aural comprehension centres of your brain.’

Rubio put himself between Cayne and Varren. His psychic hood flickered with light, though none of it was of his doing.

‘What do you hear?’ demanded Rubio.

‘The noise of a gun deck,’ said Cayne. ‘What else would I hear?’

Rubio nodded and said, ‘Be thankful you are a man of pure reason, Tubal Cayne.’

‘What’s going on, Rubio?’ said Loken.

The psyker turned around, addressing them all. ‘Whatever you think you’re hearing, it’s not real. Low-level psychic energy is simmering beneath the surface. It’s like background radiation, but within the mind.’

‘Is it dangerous?’ said Nohai. ‘I’m showing elevated adrenal levels and combat responses in every single one of you.’

‘Because he just told us we’re under the effect of maleficarum!’ hissed Bror Tyrfingr, baring his canines.

Macer Varren unhooked his axe, finger hovering over the activation stud. The noise of its chained teeth would be heard for hundreds of metres in all directions.

Rubio’s fists clenched and ghostlights danced in the crystalline matrix of his hood. The whispering in Loken’s helmet drifted away, as if carried on a stiff breeze. Soon it was gone, leaving only the percussive hammering of the gun deck. He let out a breath.

‘What are you doing?’ Tyrfingr asked Rubio.

‘Shielding you all from the psychic bleed-off that permeates this ship,’ said the psyker, and Loken heard the strain in his voice. ‘Everything you hear from now on will be the truth.’

The thought gave Loken no comfort.