Lucius: The Faultless Blade Page 12

  ‘Then, my Eternal leader, whatever is?’

  Lucius looked up, meeting the Composer’s radiant gaze. ‘I am in no mood for your lunatic games. You saw the point from where the message originated. Make ready to guide the ship through the Sea of Souls.’ Lucius turned away, striding down towards the ornate doors leading from the sorcerer’s spire.

  ‘We are leaving the Eye.’

  II.III

  The defeated Legions of the Horus Heresy viewed the Eye of Terror as a prison as often as they did a refuge, and they did so for good reason. For a place to be considered a refuge, there had to be possibility of leaving, to withdraw from its succour and re-enter the world at large. At the threshold of the Eye of Terror, a watchful Imperium toiled and stockpiled and planned in order to prevent any such possibility from occurring.

  Vast battlefleets of incomprehensible scale prowled at the edges of the gaping wound in the material universe, hundreds of ships crewed by the cream of mankind’s navies. Sprinkled amongst their shoals of gothic battlemented warships sailed the baroque and feared vessels of the Holy Inquisition, its agents more learned and experienced of the foe that strained to spill from the Eye’s storms and poison the Emperor’s realm than any other. Entire Chapters of Imperial Space Marines were committed to patrolling the contested space. They were oath bound to defend it to their dying breath, to the last drop of their transhuman blood, for no martial force was better equipped to combat the Emperor’s fallen angels than they.

  At the centre of its swirling fleets, shadowed agents and Angels of Death, the bulwark of the Imperium’s defence against its Archenemy hung like a steel sphere in the eternal night. Cadia, a fortress world unmatched by any not bathed in the light of blessed Sol, stood its endless vigil, as it had ever since the forces of the fallen Heresy had returned to reignite the war they had lost. And ever since the dawn of that darkest of days, it had endured. While it stood, so too did the future of the Imperium. Without Cadia, a shadow would fall over humanity, one so dark and so long that it would threaten to reach the very Throneworld itself.

  Cadia had long ceased to be a planet of rock and oceans. It was now a factory. An uncaring machine that devoured children and raw ­materials, grinding them into the new forms it required of them. From its manufactorums and training grounds, the fortress world vomited out disciplined ranks of grim soldiers and deadly war machines to serve in the Emperor’s armies. Those who would leave its orbit would carry the banners of Cadia high, for they waged the wars of the Imperium as second to none among any of mortal man. The best, though, the true elite to rise from its brutal, ceaseless training and endless preparations, would never leave its soil.

  Like the fleets swirling over them, drowning out the light of stars, the soldiers of the Cadian Gate would wait. They would stand sentinel, manning the walls until the next evil broke loose, and they would fight until death took them at last into the peace of the Emperor.

  Arvel Donata was not fond of waiting. Standing ahead of his command throne, his knuckles rapped impatiently against the brass railing he leaned against. It was an irritating habit, ingrained from long patrols through the same single narrow corridor of space, and the others on the bridge had either learned to ignore it over time or lacked the rank or standing to gainsay him.

  Donata’s father had been Astra Militarum, infantry, a lieutenant of the vaunted companies immortalised by their holding of the Gate against the vile hordes of the Despoiler in his last Black Crusade. He had died, broken upon the walls he had been born to hold, and become a mythical entity to Arvel as a child. His father had lived up to the destiny of all those armed in defence of Cadia, and there was nothing in this galaxy Arvel desired more than to do the same when his moment arrived.

  When his processing assessment had assigned him not to the infantry, but the Imperial Navy, Arvel had first experienced a deep, lancing regret. Disappointment coloured his mind, before he reported to his station. Once he strode the decks of an Imperial warship, tasked with serving as the tip of the spear to plunge into the heart of any invader that dared assault the Gate, his pride was restored manifold.

  Years of duty had seen him serve aboard three vessels within Battle­fleet Cadia, rising in rank and responsibility before, at last, he was given his first command. She was the Bolt of Corsa, a venerable Cobra-class destroyer with a history of service as long as Arvel’s family chain. Her iron bones creaked, and the spirit at her heart was cantankerous at the best of times, but she sang for Arvel. Despite a life in the void, he was a ground pounder at heart, and wanted nothing more than to sink the destroyer’s magazines of torpedoes into the enemy like a knight lancing a foul monstrosity in the days of Terran myth.

  In all his years, in command of the Bolt of Corsa and before, Arvel had participated in six engagements, and only two of them had required his vessel to fire its weapons. And so, like the others at the Cadian Gate, Arvel Donata waited, beating a grating tattoo against the railing and dreaming of monsters to slay.

  Any attempt to break free of the madness that was the Eye of Terror back into the Imperium of Mankind was a monumentally dangerous undertaking, even before the threat of Imperial guns. Living storms of diseased emotion and daemonic entities large enough to eclipse moons menaced any who drew close to returning to the material realm. Roving bands of reavers and pirate armadas stalked the shadows of the calmer passages, primed to pounce upon those seeking to avoid the most savage of the tides. Vast warfleets, even those of the Despoiler himself, absorbed horrific casualties just reaching the brink of the great Eye, losing dozens of ships that were reduced to bleached husks by the infernal predations that swelled within.

  But a single ship, if her captain was cautious and her course carefully guided by an adept Navigator, had a chance to enter into such a gauntlet of hazards and emerge intact. And though it had been centuries since her decks had been graced by one of the Navis Nobilite, the Diadem still knifed through the immaterium towards the boiling threshold of the Eye, its path charted by one who utilised more arcane means.

  From a throne at the tip of his spire, surrounded by the writhing forms of his supplicants, the Composer stared into the tempest. Blind hooded acolytes stood upon the spiral stairs, waving incense orbs and droning out sonorous chants from augmetic throats. Waves of brutal psychic energy lashed at the Diadem’s hull, peeling around her Geller field, which just about encapsulated the high spinal tower the sorcerer sat within. The crystal dome was bared to the madness, its shields retracted. Tortured things of prismatic fire clawed at the Composer from beyond the Geller field, the maddening shrieks they emitted jarring and clashing with the chilling screams of his slaves.

  To him, it was music. The notes of the Great Song guided the Composer, a lullaby and triumphant call as transcendent as the very heartbeat of Slaanesh Himself. Each talon of raw emotion that lashed at the ship, seeking to drive her from her course and sending tremors through her superstructure, was beautiful to him, like a skilled musician plucking the strings of his instrument. Even the severe pain of each blow, knifing into his fraying concentration as he fought to maintain the strike cruiser’s course, was a blessing, and he shouted prayers of thanksgiving to the Dark Prince for the sensual bounty that was being bestowed upon him.

  The Diadem clawed towards the edges of the maelstrom, and the joyful prayers ceased. Agony had filed the Composer’s mind down to a burning sliver of focus. His teeth creaked in his jaw. Blood wept from his eyes and nose, and came bubbling from his lips. The jostling hull of the warship hurled hooded servants from the tower, their cries muted as they struck the deck walkway or crashed against the bottom of the dome. The ancient animus of the warship howled in pain as the storms threatened to twist her into shards of broken iron and shattered ceramite. Everything, including the machine-spirit itself, screamed at him to pull the ship around, to turn back before she was ripped apart into oblivion.

  Consoles exploded behind the Composer. Jets of spar
ks immolated the servitors socketed into them in fountains of neon rain. Klaxons began caterwauling, joining their mechanical screams to those of flesh. The Geller field was seconds from overloading. The capsule of protective light sparked and buckled around the Composer, straining to hold back the surging miasma.

  Its collapse, here, would flood the Diadem with Neverborn in all their multitudes. They would tear the ship apart, leaving it as one more forgotten husk lost in the gale, while the souls aboard would face a fate far worse than mere death. Slowly, like creeping fingers of black lightning, cracks began to branch across the surface of the dome. The Composer heard the daemons on the other side rejoice at the feast of souls that awaited them.

  And then, like the passage of a sourceless shiver dancing up one’s spine, it was over. The empty void stretched out before the Diadem, depthless, all encompassing and calm. The Composer rose from his throne, but his legs buckled. He crashed to one knee upon the deck, hand clawing at his chest, drooling blood-laced saliva from his lips.

  The sorcerer of the Emperor’s Children vomited a stream of viscous sludge onto his boot, before keying the vox-bead in his gorget’s armoured collar.

  ‘It is done,’ rasped the Composer, weariness soaking every syllable. ‘We are free of the Eye.’

  A faint glimmer twinkled in the void, impossibly distant yet closer than the silver pinpricks of stars.

  ‘Make haste, or they shall soon be upon us.’

  ‘Acknowledged,’ replied Clarion. ‘Ready yourself, little witch. We will re-enter the warp soon.’ The child depressed a rune on her throne’s armrest, severing the vox-link. She looked up at Lucius. The Eternal met her stare, seeking the shining hunger in the golden orbs.

  ‘Clarity, little one, and focus,’ said Lucius softly. ‘This is not the time for games. We must slip beneath their notice. We cannot raise their ire, not here.’

  A naval rating scurried to his overseer, clutching a ream of vellum auspex readouts. The officer turned, quickly approaching the throne.

  ‘Mistress, long-range auspex confirms multiple inbound contacts.’

  Clarion smiled at Lucius, childlike yet utterly inhuman at the same time.

  ‘You were saying?’

  There were many amongst the ship crews of Battlefleet Cadia, the eldest and most aged sailors mostly, who succumbed to the superstition that the Eye of Terror itself was alive. It was a soft blasphemy born in the depths of ships, kept quietly to its believers’ chests and away from the ears of the officer corps and shipboard Commissariat. Yet the more one served patrolling its boiling edge, the more believable the folktale became.

  The extensive long-range auspex scans that swept continuously over the anomaly often detected solid matter materialising out of it into reality. The fastest ships of the nearest squadrons to the positive return would burn their engines bright, pushing them to their limits as they raced to confirm the scanner’s readings. Crews would scramble to their stations. Prayers reserved for the eve of battle would bellow from the lips of preachers to blare across the decks from vox-horns. Press-ganged slaves would labour to haul immense ordnance into the breeches of even larger weapons, drowning in incense from robed priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus as they blessed every shell and cannon.

  The rest of the battlefleet would marshal itself together. Warships congealed into perfect formations that had been drilled and drilled until they became reflex. The forces of the Cadian Gate would hold their collective breath, their bridges silent, waiting on a knife’s edge for the Eye to vomit forth another of the Warmaster Abaddon’s Black Crusades.

  Almost every time, the vanguard of the Archenemy’s invasion was revealed to be nothing. A rotten husk of shipwreck, or a tumbling mass of ice and rock randomly discharged into reality from the immaterial gash. The true identity of each object would be established after the reaction force had sailed through its wreckage, ripping it apart with their guns equally to confirm it was no façade as well as to vent the frustration of the commanders.

  The battlefleet’s crews would release the breath they had been holding, and divide back into their individual routines. And the oldest ratings in the darkest decks would give a mirthless chuckle, swearing they could hear the warp wound’s laughter at the trick it had pulled on them yet again.

  This was the case, almost every time. Almost. As the Bolt of Corsa raced at the head of her squadron towards the ghostly auspex return, Arvel Donata prayed that today would be the exception to the rule.

  His bridge was a scene of orchestrated mayhem. Ratings and junior officers paced through recessed pits in the deck and along banks of cogitators that lined the walls, passing and delivering orders and status reports. Servitors clanked and murmured from the stations they had been permanently sutured into. They were a fine crew, drilled to precision, and they knew the expectations their commander had for them.

  Arvel checked a screed of updated sensor returns on a data-slate connected to his right armrest, referencing it against the miniature tactical hololith that projected from the left one. The stuttering image of hard grey light refreshed every handful of seconds, displaying the squadron of six Cobra destroyers as a double chevron of blue runes inching towards an icon of blinking scarlet. The combined payloads from the six torpedo boats would be enough to cripple a capital ship, if the captains were good. Arvel knew the officers in command of each vessel personally. They were.

  ‘Firing solutions plotted and sent to my station as soon as they are confirmed,’ said the captain. ‘I want ordnance in the void without any delay once we reach maximum firing range.’

  He looked down, seeing his hands trembling, and clasped them together. It was not fear, and for all his bravado Arvel was honest enough with himself to know that. It was adrenaline and anticipation, just the shaking of a young racer, eager to leave the starting blocks.

  The distance on the tactical hololith shrank further, the runes almost touching despite the staggering distance that still stretched between them.

  ‘Shields up,’ Arvel commanded. He felt the deck shiver beneath his boots as the plasma drives scaled back their output, and heard the old girl groan through her iron bones. Arvel had bled power from the void shields and fed it to the engines for speed, as had the rest of the squadron per standard tactical protocol. But now, as they drew closer to weapons range, he reversed the process to encase the Bolt of Corsa once more in multiple layers of protective energy.

  Arvel looked through the panel blocks of dense armourglass that made up the forward end of the bridge, set high upon the destroyer’s aftcastle. He saw nothing of the incoming contact, but in the realm of void warfare, that was the expected way of things. If he and a foe were ever close enough to establish visual contact with one another, then they were in for a brawl that a torpedo boat was not designed for. The single macro-cannon mounted above the reinforced spade of the Bolt of Corsa’s prow was a weapon of last resort, and the shells she spat were not capable of inflicting damage upon a larger target in any meaningful way. No, she was best utilised as a distance fighter, one that hunted best when she was in her element, with the enemy at maximum range.

  The hololith refreshed again, and Arvel watched the twin chevrons of his squadron merge and flatten. The other destroyers drew up alongside the Bolt of Corsa, matching her speed as they came together to form a firing line. Two chimes beeped upon the console built into Arvel’s throne.

  ‘Maximum weapons range achieved, sir,’ called out a junior officer from the gunnery pit.

  ‘Firing solutions confirmed and transmitted,’ came the crackling drawl of a lobotomised servitor slaved to a targeting cogitator.

  Arvel rose up and stepped from his throne, placing steady hands upon the railing.

  ‘All torpedoes, full spread. Fire.’

  II.IV

  Where the command decks of the Imperial vessels were mired in commotion and anxious noise, the bridge of the Diadem was ser
ene. Her crew went about their duties calmly, the very picture of precision and tranquillity. Clarion paid no heed to the ringing bells warning of the enemy torpedoes racing inbound towards them, silencing them with an irritated look to one of her senior officers. The strike cruiser would be long gone before the ordnance even came close to hitting them.

  When the data inloads for the auspex locks had reached her throne, the readings had been enough to make the child’s mouth water. Six Imperial Cobra-class destroyers. Dedicated ship killers designed to array themselves in void duels opposite larger foes, groaning with crew and treasure. Within the Eye, the plunder from such an engagement would feed the material and flesh needs of the Diadem for months.

  She wanted to destroy them. She really wanted to destroy them. It had taken a concerted effort on Clarion’s part not to argue the point further. Lucius’ decree was inviolate. They would not survive stirring the hornet’s nest at the most heavily fortified planet in the Imperium outside of the Throneworld. They could not risk such an ignominious end simply to sate her need to sow mayhem.

  Clarion sighed, crossing her tiny arms as he gave the order to turn and run. She plotted a course, transmitting it to her navigational crews. It had been seventeen minutes since the Diadem had emerged from the Eye. The violence of their expulsion had meant the plasma drives needed precious time to recalibrate, as well as to provide Lucius’ pet witch with a moment of respite before they dived right back into the Sea of Souls on the way to their true destination. The drives thrummed once more to deep-throated life, and the Diadem surged forwards in the perpetual dark.

  Lucius stood beside Clarion’s throne, hand lingering upon the pommel of his blade, the very image of feigned trust. The child could hardly blame him though. When betrayal was the one constant in a life, how could you expect somebody to trust anything?