VII

FLIGHT

 

 

Freedom.

A relative concept, Maruc reflected, when I have no idea where I am. But it was a start.

Time was fluid when nothing ever changed. At his best estimate, they’d kept him chained down here like a dog for six or seven days. With no way to know for sure, he founded the guess on the amount people slept, and how much they’d been forced to shit themselves.

His world was reduced to a blanket of darkness and the smell of human waste. Every so often in the numberless hours, dull light from lamp packs would spear around the grouped people as the ship’s pale crew came in with salted strip-meat rations and tin mugs of brackish water. They spoke in a language Maruc had never heard before, hissing and ash-ash-ash-ing at each other. None of them ever addressed their captives. They came in, fed the prisoners, and left. Immersed in darkness again, the captives barely had enough chain between each of them to move more than a metre apart.

With the exaggerated stealth he’d used on Ganges, he slipped the iron ring off his chafed ankle. He was missing his boots, filthy and standing with his socks in a puddle of cold piss. Still, he thought again, it’s definitely a start.

“What are you doing?” asked the man next to him.

“Leaving.” What a question. “I’m getting out of here.”

“Help us. You can’t just go, you have to help us.” He could hear heads turning in his direction, though none of them could see through the absolute blackness. More voices joined the plea.

“Help me.”

“Don’t leave us here…”

“Who’s free? Help us!”

He hissed at them to be quiet. The press of their stinking bodies was a clammy, meaty pressure all around. The slaves stood in the pitch darkness, shackled at the ankles, clad in whatever they’d been wearing when they’d been dragged from the decks of Ganges Station. Maruc had no idea how many of them were in this chamber with him, but it sounded like a few dozen. Their voices echoed off the walls. Whatever storage hold they’d been dumped in, it was big. The ship that had attacked Ganges was clearly not something to mess with, killers from myth or not.

I’ve decided not to die. It sounded foolish even to himself.

“I’m going for help,” he said, keeping his voice low. It was easy enough—dehydration roughened his throat, almost silencing him completely.

“Help?” Bodies jostled against him as someone way ahead moved position. “I’m in Station Defence,” he called back in a harsh whisper. “Everyone’s dead on Ganges. How did you get free?”

“I worked my shackle loose.” He stepped away, blindly feeling through the press of bodies to where he hoped the door was. People cursed him and pushed back, as if offended by his freedom.

Relief flooded him when his outstretched hands grazed the cold metal wall. Maruc began to feel his way left, seeking the door with filthy fingertips. If he could open it, there was a chance that—

There. His questing hands met the door’s ridged edge. Now, did it open by a pressure plate mounted on the wall, or a codepad?

Here. Here it is. Maruc brushed his fingertips along the raised keys, feeling a standard nine-button codepad. Each of the buttons was larger than he’d expected, and faintly indented by use.

Maruc held his breath, hoping to slow his clamouring heart. He keyed in six buttons at random.

The door slid open on ungreased tracks, groaning loud enough to wake the dead. Light from the other side spilled into Maruc’s eyes.

“Uh… hello,” said a female voice.

 

“Get back,” Septimus warned. He had both pistols in his hands, aimed at the escaped slave’s head. “Another step. That’s right.”

Octavia rolled her eyes. “He’s unarmed.”

Septimus didn’t lower his bulky pistols. “Shine the light inside. How many are free?” Octavia complied, panning the spear of light over the grim scene.

“Just him.”

“Forfallian dal sur shissis lalil na sha dareel.” Septimus’ words were lost on her, but his face showed he was cursing. “We must be cautious. Watch yourself.”

She glanced at him for a moment. Watch yourself? As if she needed to be told to be careful? Idiot.

“Of course,” she huffed. “A real horde of danger here.”

“I protect mistress.” Her attendant, ever present at Octavia’s side, had a grubby sawn-off shotgun clutched in his bandaged hands. His sealed eyes stared at the freed slave. She bit back the very real need to punch both of them for their overprotective swaggering.

“He’s unarmed,” she repeated, gesturing at Maruc. “He… Sil vasha…uh… Sil vasha nuray.”

Her attendant sniggered. Octavia shot him a look.

“That means, ‘He has no arms’,” Septimus replied. He still hadn’t lowered his guns. “You. Slave. How did you get free?”

When the glare faded, Maruc found himself staring at three people. One was a hunchbacked little freak in a sackcloth cloak with his eyes sewn shut. Next to him, a tall girl with dark hair and the whitest skin he’d ever seen on a woman. And next to her, a scruffy fellow with bionics on his temple and cheekbone, with two pistols aimed right at Maruc’s face.

“I worked my shackles loose,” he admitted. “Look… Where are we? What are you doing to us?”

“My name is Septimus.” He still didn’t lower the guns. “I serve the Legiones Astartes aboard this ship.” His voice carried into the chamber. No one spoke. “I’m here to find out each of your professions and areas of expertise, to determine your value to the Eighth Legion.”

Maruc swallowed. “There is no Eighth Legion. I know my mythology.”

Septimus couldn’t entirely fight down the smile. “Talk like that will get you killed on this ship. What was your duty on Ganges?” As the guns came down, so did Maruc’s hands. He was suddenly uncomfortably aware that he needed a shower like never before.

“Manufaction, mostly.”

“You worked in the refinery?”

“Construction. At the conveyance belts. Assembly line stuff.”

“And the machinery?”

“Some of it. When they broke down and needed a kick.”

Septimus hesitated. “That was difficult work.”

“You’re telling me.” A strange pride flowed through him at that moment. “I know it was a grind. I was the one doing it.”

Septimus holstered his guns. “After we have done this, you are coming with me.”

“I am?”

“You are.” Septimus coughed politely. “You will also need to bathe.” He entered the chamber, and the others followed him. Octavia’s attendant kept his shotgun gripped tight. The Navigator offered an awkward smile to Maruc.

“Don’t try to run,” she said. “Or he’ll shoot you. This won’t take long.”

One by one, Septimus gathered their former duties, noting them down on a data-slate. This was the third slave hold they’d visited. None of the prisoners had attacked him so far.

“Are they dosed with kalma?” she whispered at one point.

“What?”

“The pacifying narcotic. We use it on Terra, sometimes.” She sighed at his glance. “Forget it. Are you slipping something into their water rations? Why don’t they do something? Why not try to fight us?”

“Because what I’m offering them is no different from what they already did.” He hesitated and turned to her. “As I remember, you didn’t fight me, either.”

She gave him what would have been a coquettish smile, had it come from a noble-born scion of a Terran spire family, clad in her full finery. Instead, it looked a little sleazy and a little wicked. “Well,” she toyed with her ponytail, “you were much nicer to me than you were to these people.”

“Of course I was.” Septimus led the way out. Behind them both, Maruc and her attendant trailed along. The others had been instructed to wait until more crew came to take them to other parts of the ship, so they could clean themselves and begin their new duties.

“So why were you nicer to me?” she asked.

“Because you took me by surprise. I knew you were a Navigator, but I’d never seen one before.” His human eye glinted in the torchlight. “I wasn’t expecting you to be beautiful.”

She was glad the darkness hid her smile. When he tried, he could say just the right th—

“And because you were so valuable to the Legion,” he added. “I had to be careful with you. The master ordered it.”

This time, the darkness hid her glare. Idiot.

“What’s your name?” she asked Maruc.

“Maruc.”

A smile preceded her answer. It was the kind of look that made him suspect her father must’ve crumbled under glances like that. “Don’t get used to it,” she said. “Our lord and master might have a different idea.”

“What’s your name?” Maruc asked her.

“Octavia. I’m the eighth.”

Maruc nodded, gesturing at Septimus’ back with a dirty finger. “And he’s Septimus, because he’s the seventh?”

The taller man looked back over his shoulder. “Exactly.”

“I do not have a name,” the hunched attendant provided helpfully. Stitched-shut eyes regarded him for a moment. “But Septimus calls me Hound.”

Maruc already hated the creepy little thing. He forced an aching smile until the twisted fellow looked away, then he glanced at the girl again. “Septimus and Octavia. The seventh and eighth,” he said. When she just nodded, he cleared his sore throat to ask. “The seventh and eighth what?”

 

The Exalted sat upon its throne at the heart of the strategium, brooding amongst its Atramentar. Garadon and Malek stood closest to their liege lord, both warriors casting hulking shadows in their tusked and horned Terminator war plate, with their weapons deactivated and sheathed.

Around the raised dais, the bridge crew worked under the harsh glare of spotlighting glaring down at each console. While most warships’ command decks were bathed in illumination, the Covenant of Blood lingered in a welcome darkness broken only by pockets of light around the human crew.

The Exalted drew a breath, and listened for a voice it could no longer hear.

“What troubles you, lord?” This, from Garadon. The warrior shifted his stance, causing his war plate’s joints to sound in a clashing opera of grinding servos. Rather than answer, the Exalted ignored its bodyguard’s concern, keeping its thoughts turned within. The mortal shell it wore—this swollen icon of daemonic strength—was its own, through and through. The creature had wormed its way within the Legionary’s form, hollowing it out and melting across its genetic coding in the most insidious and beautiful usurpation. The body that had once been Captain Vandred Anrathi of the Eighth Legion was no more: now the Exalted reigned in this husk, proud of its theft and the comfortable malformation to suit its new owner.

But the mind, the memories—these were forever stained by the taste of another soul. To quest through the husk’s thoughts was to bear distant witness to another being’s memories, dredging them for meaning and lore. With each invasion, the Exalted’s violating mental tendrils would meet the enraged—and helpless—presence curled foetal within the thoughts. Vandred’s shade bunched itself tightly within his own brain, forever severed from the blood, bones and the flesh that he’d once commanded.

And now… silence. Silence for days, weeks.

Gone was the laughter that edged upon madness. Gone were the tormented cries promising vengeance each time the Exalted sifted through the psyche’s accumulated knowledge and instinct.

The creature breathed through its open jaws, sending tendrils of thought back into its mind. Their questing reach spilled memories and emotions in a ransacking mess.

Life upon a world of eternal night.

The stars in the sky, bright enough to hurt the eyes on cloudless evenings.

The pride of watching an enemy ship burn up in orbit, trembling its way down to crash upon the world below.

The awe, the love, a devastating rush of emotion felt while staring at a primarch father that took no pride in any of his sons’ accomplishments.

The same pale corpse of a father, broken by the lies he fed himself, inventing betrayals to sate his devouring madness.

These were fragments of what the husk’s former owner had left behind: shards of memory, scattered across the psyche in abandoned disorder.

The Exalted sifted through them, seeking anything that still lived. But… Nothing. Nothing existed within the bowels of this brain. Vandred, the scraps of him that had remained, were gone. Did this herald a new phase in the Exalted’s evolution? Was it at last free of the clinging, sickening mortal soul that had resisted annihilation for so many decades?

Perhaps, perhaps.

It drew breath again, licking its maw clean of the acidic saliva. With a grunt, it summoned Malek closer and—

Vandred.

It was less a name, more a press of personality, a sudden aggressive burst of memory and emotion, boiling against the Exalted’s brain. The creature laughed at the feeble assault, amused that the shadow of Vandred’s soul would mount such an attack on the dominant consciousness after all this time. The silence hadn’t been a symptom of the soul’s destruction after all; Vandred had hidden, burrowing deeper within their twisted shared psyche, building his energy for this futile attempt at a coup.

Sleep, little fleshthing, the Exalted chuckled. Back you go.

The shrieks faded slowly, until they were swallowed once more, becoming the faintest background buzz at the very edge of the Exalted’s inhuman perception.

Well. That had been an amusing distraction. The creature opened its eyes again, drawing breath into the husk to speak its decree to Malek.

A storm of light and sound awaited back in the external world: wailing sirens, rushing crew, shouting human voices. A laugh from within stroked at the Exalted’s senses—the shadow of Vandred, revelling in his pathetic victory, distracting the daemon for a handful of moments.

The Exalted rose from its throne. Already, its inhuman mind stole answers from the barrage of sensory input. The sirens were low-threat proximity warnings. The ship was still docked. The auspex console chimed in urgent declaration, a tri-pulse that suggested either three inbound ships, or several smaller vessels bunched together. Given their location, it would be worthless haulier ships in service to the Adeptus Mechanicus; an Imperial Navy patrol blown far off-course by the winds of the warp; or, in all unfortunate probability, the arrival of a vanguard fleet in the colours of the Chapter Astartes sworn to defend this region of space.

“Disengage all umbilicals from the station.”

“Underway, my lord.” The mortal bridge attendant—was it Dallow? Dathow? Such insignificant details struggled to remain in the Exalted’s mind—bent over his console, his former Imperial Navy uniform devoid of all allegiance markings. The man hadn’t shaved in several days. His jawline was decorated with greying stubble.

Dallon, Vandred’s voice ghosted through the creature’s mind.

“All systems to full power. Bring us about immediately.”

“Aye, lord.”

The creature extended its senses, letting its hearing and sight bond with the Covenant’s far-reaching auspex sensors. There, burning in the deep void, the warm coals of enemy engine cores. The Exalted leaned into the sensation, wrapping its sightless vision around the approaching presences—a blind man counting the stones in his hand.

Three. Three smaller vessels. A frigate patrol.

The Exalted opened its eyes. “Status report.”

“All systems, aye.” Dallon was still working his console as the Master of Auspex called out from his scanner table. “Three ships inbound, my lord. Nova-class frigates.”

On the occulus screen, the view resolved into the form of three Adeptus Astartes vessels, cutting the night as they speared closer. Even at their speed, it would take over twenty minutes for them to reach weapon range. More than enough time to disengage and run.

Nova-class. Ship-killers. These carried weapons for void-duelling, rather than Imperial Space Marines for close-range boarding actions.

All faces turned to the Exalted—all except the servitors slaved to the ship’s systems, who mumbled and drooled and cogitated, blind to anything outside their programming. The human crew watched expectantly, awaiting further orders.

It knew what they expected. It knew with sudden clarity that every human in the oval chamber expected the Exalted to order another retreat. To flee made perfect sense; the Covenant was still a shadow of its former might, limping from the scars earned during the brutality at Crythe.

The Exalted licked its maw with a black tongue. Three frigates. At optimal strength, the Covenant would drive through them like a spear, shattering all three with contemptuous ease. Perhaps, if the fates allowed it, the Covenant could still…

No.

The Covenant was close to complete ruin. Its ammunition loaders were empty, its plasma drives starved. They’d not used the Shriek on an amused whim—the Exalted ordered Deltrian to fashion it from necessity, along with the prophet’s human slave serving on the station as a traitor on the inside. Attacking Ganges through conventional means had never been a viable possibility. Nor was surviving this fight, even against such insignificant prey.

Yet for a moment, the temptation was agonisingly strong. Could they win this? The Exalted let its consciousness dissipate through the vessel’s iron bones. The plunder leeched from Ganges was still mostly in the ship’s holds, not yet processed into usable compounds. All the raw material in the galaxy wouldn’t help for a second.

Then the time for baring blades and showing fangs would come soon. Now was the time to be ruled by reason, not rage. The Exalted clenched its teeth, forcing calm into its words.

“Come abeam of Ganges. All starboard broadsides to fire at will. If we cannot finish stripping our prize, then no one will.”

The ship shivered as it began to obey. The Exalted turned its horned head to its bridge attendant. “Dallon. Ready for translation into the warp. Once Ganges is in pieces, we run.”

Again.

“As you command, lord.”

“Open a link to the Navigator,” the Exalted growled. “Let us get this over with.”

 

She sprinted through the darkness, led by memory and the dull lance of illumination from her lamp pack. Her footsteps rang out down the metal corridors, echoing enough to become the panicked sound of a horde of fleeing people. Behind, she heard her attendant struggling to keep up.

“Mistress!” he called again. His wails were receding as she outpaced him.

She didn’t slow down. The deck thrummed beneath her pounding feet. Power. Life. The Covenant was moving again, after days of sitting dead in dock.

“Get back to your chambers,” the Exalted’s voice had drawled, irritation utterly unmasked. Even if the creature could threaten her, it didn’t need to. She wanted this. She ached to sail again, and desire moved her limbs more than any devotion to duty.

She’d argued even as she obeyed. “I thought the Marines Errant weren’t due here for months.”

Before severing the link, the Exalted had grunted its disapproval. “Evidently, destiny has a sense of humour.”

Octavia ran on.

Her quarters were nowhere near Blackmarket. Octavia scattered her attendants as she finally reached her chamber after almost ten minutes of running down stairs, along decking, and simply leaping down the smaller stairwells.

“Mistress, mistress, mistress,” they greeted her in an irritating chorus. Breathless and aching, she staggered past them, crashing down onto her interface throne. Responding to her presence, the wall of screens came to life before her. Picters and imagifiers mounted on the ship’s hull opened their irises as one, staring out into the void from a hundred angles. As she caught her breath, she saw space, and space, and space—no different from the days before, as they’d sat here in the middle of nowhere, docked and half-crippled by damage. Only now, the stars moved. She smiled as she watched them starting their slow dance.

On a dozen screens, the stars meandered to the left. On a dozen others, they sailed right, or coasted down, or rose up. She leaned back into the throne of black iron and took a breath. The Covenant was coming about. Ganges hove into view, an ugly palace of black and grey. She felt the ship shiver as its weapons screamed. Despite herself, she smiled again. Throne, this ship was majestic when it chose to be.

Her attendants closed in around her, bandaged hands and dirty fingers holding interface cables and restraint straps.

“Piss off,” she told them, and snatched off her bandana. That sent them scattering.

I’m here, she said silently. I’m back.

From within her own mind, a presence that had lingered as a tiny, dense core of unrest began to unfold. It spread, great sheets of discordant emotion unwrapping to blanket her thoughts. It was a struggle to keep herself separate from the invader’s passions.

You, the presence whispered. The recognition was laced with disgust, but it was a faint and distant thing.

Her heart was a thudding drum now. Not fear, she told herself. Anticipation. Anticipation, excitement, and… well, alright, fear. But the throne was all the interface she needed. Octavia refused the crude implantation of psy-feed cables, let alone needing restraints. Those were the crutches for the laziest Navigators, and while her bloodline might not be worth much in terms of breeding, she felt this ship well enough to reject the interface aids.

Not me. Us. Her inner voice tingled with savage joy.

Cold. Weary. Slow. The voice was the low rumble of something tectonic. I awaken. But I am frozen by the void. I thirst and hunger.

She wasn’t sure what to say. It was strange to hear the ship address her with such tolerance, even if it was patience brought on by exhaustion.

It sensed her surprise through the resonant throne. Soon, my heart will burn. Soon, we will dive through space and unspace. Soon, you will shriek and shed salt water. I remember, Navigator. I remember your fear of the endless dark, far from the Beacon of Pain.

She refused to rise to its primitive baiting. The machine-spirit at the ship’s heart was a vicious, tormented thing, and at best—at its absolute least unpleasant—it still loathed her. Much more often, it was a siege just to unify her thoughts with the vessel at all.

You are blind without me, she said. When will you tire of this war between us?

You are crippled without me, it countered. When will you tire of believing you dominate our accord?

She… she hadn’t thought about it like that. Her hesitation must’ve flowed down the link, because she felt the ship’s black heart beat faster, and another tremor ghosted through the Covenant’s bones. Runes flickered on several of her screens, all in Nostraman script. She knew enough to recognise an update of increased power capacity in the plasma generator. Septimus had taught her the Nostraman alphabet and pictographic signals pertaining to the ship’s function. “The essentials”, he’d called it, as if she were a particularly dim child.

A coincidence, then? Just the engines building up energy, rather than her thoughts triggering the shipwide shiver?

I grow warm, the Covenant told her. We hunt soon.

No. We run.

Somehow, it sighed within her mind. At least, that was how her human awareness interpreted the breathless pulse of inhuman frustration that slid behind her eyes.

Still uneasy from the ship’s accusation, she kept her thoughts back, holding them inside her skull, boxed away from the machine-spirit’s reach. In silence, she watched Ganges burn, waiting for the order to guide the ship through a wound in reality.

 

The warp engines came alive with a dragon’s roar, echoing in two realms at once.

“Where?” Octavia spoke aloud, her voice a wet whisper.

“Make for the Maelstrom,” came the Exalted’s reply, guttural over the vox. “We cannot linger in Imperial space any longer.”

“I don’t know how to reach it.”

Oh, but she did. Couldn’t she feel it—a bloated, overripe migraine that hurt her head with each beat of her heart? Couldn’t she sense it with the same ease as a blind woman feeling the sunrise on her face?

She didn’t know the way there through the warp, that was true. She’d never sailed through a tempest to reach a hurricane’s heart. But she could sense it, and she knew that was enough to reach it.

The Maelstrom. The Covenant heard her torment and responded itself. Waves of sickening familiarity washed over the Navigator as it felt the ship’s primitive memory through the bond they shared. Her skin prickled and she needed to spit. The vessel’s dull recollection became her own: a memory of the void boiling with cancerous ghosts, of tainted tides crashing against its hull. Whole worlds, entire suns, drowning in the Sea of Souls.

“I have never sailed into a warp rift,” she managed to say. If the Exalted replied, she never heard it.

But I have, the Covenant hissed.

She knew the tales, as every Navigator did. To plough into a warp rift was no different than swimming in acid. Each moment within its tides flayed ever more of a sailor’s soul.

Legends and half-truths, the ship mocked her. It is the warp, and it is the void. Calmer than the storm, louder than space. And then, Brace, Navigator.

Octavia closed her human eyes and opened her truest one. Madness, in a million shades of black, swarmed towards her like a tide. Forever present in the darkness, a beam of abrasive light seared its way through the chaos, burning away the stuff of screaming souls and formless malice that rippled against its edges. A beacon in the black, the Golden Path, the Emperor’s Light.

The Astronomican, she breathed in instinctive awe, and aimed the ship towards it. Solace, guidance, blessed light. Safety.

The Covenant rebelled, its hull straining against her, creaking and cracking under the strain.

No. Away from the Beacon of Pain. Into the tides of night.

The Navigator leaned back in her throne, licking sweat from her upper lip. The feeling taking hold reminded her of standing in the observatory atop her father’s house-spire, feeling the unbelievable urge to leap from the balcony of the tallest tower. She’d felt it often as a child, that prickly sense of daring and doubt clashing inside her until the moment she leaned just a little too far. Her stomach would lurch and she’d come back to herself. She couldn’t jump. She didn’t want to—not really.

The ship roared in her mind as it rolled, the waters of hell crashing against its hull. Her ears hosted the unwelcome, ignorable sounds of human crew members shouting several decks above.

You will destroy us all, the ship spat into her brain. Too weak, too weak.

Octavia was faintly certain she’d puked on herself. It smelled like it. Claws stroked the ship’s hull with the sound of squealing tyres, and the crashing of the warp’s tides became the thudding beat of a mother’s heart, overpoweringly loud to the child still slumbering in the womb.

She turned her head, watching the Astronomican darken and diminish. Was it rising away, out of her reach? Or was the ship falling from it, into th—

She suddenly tensed, blood like ice and muscles locked tighter than steel. They were free-falling through the warp. The Exalted’s cry of desperate anger rang throughout every deck, carried over the vox.

Throne, she breathed the word, swearing with her heart and soul, barely cognisant of her lips speaking over the vox to the helmsmen on the command deck above. Her speech was automatic, as instinctive as breathing. The battle in her mind was what mattered.

Throne and shit and fu—

The ship righted. Not elegantly—she’d almost lost their way completely, and the vessel’s recovery was anything but clean—but the ship pounded into a calmer stream with both relief and abandon. The Covenant’s hull gave a last horrendous spasm, rocked to its core as she stared the way she wished to go.

She felt the primal machine-spirit calming. The ship obeyed her course, as true and straight as a sword. Even if it loathed her, it flew far finer than the fat barge she’d suffered on under Kartan Syne. Where the Maiden of the Stars wallowed, the Covenant of Blood raced. Untouchable grace and wrath incarnate. No one in her bloodline, not in thirty-six generations, had guided such a vessel.

You are beautiful, she told the ship without meaning to.

And you are weak.

Octavia stared into the tides around the ship. Above, the Emperor’s Light receded, while below, the faint outlines of great shapeless things thrashed in the infinite, turgid black. She sailed by instinct, blinder than she’d ever been before, guiding them all towards a distant eye in the storm.