XXII

ECHO OF DAMNATION

 

 

The shaking set Octavia’s teeth knocking together. Being leashed into an oversized throne didn’t help; she was clutching her restraint straps much tighter than they were returning the favour, and her hips thudded against the seat’s sides as the turbulence rattled her around.

Maruc was next to her, his hands as white-knuckled as hers. He may have been yelling, but the noise stole any evidence of it.

“Is it always like this?” she cried out.

“Yes,” one of the Legionaries voxed back. “Always. Except Uzas is usually screaming about blood, and Xarl likes to howl.”

“Blood for the Blood God! Souls, skulls, souls, skulls…”

“See?”

Octavia turned her juddering head to look over at Talos. He was sat calmly by comparison, his weapons locked to the pod’s wall behind him. She wasn’t even sure it had been him yelling back over his vox-speakers.

Xarl leaned back to give a full-throated howl. His helm’s vox-speakers corrupted it, rendering it with a tinny edge, but that did nothing to diminish the volume. The four humans covered their ears—even Hound, who had not been able to say a word yet with the way the pod was shaking. His tiny voice had no hope of registering over the din.

“Fifteen seconds,” Talos yelled over to her.

“Okay.”

“I always wanted my own ship,” Cyrion leaned forward to shout. “Talos, you can have the next one we steal.”

She smiled even as she winced at the noise. Across the pod, she met Septimus’ gaze. For the first time in a while, she found she couldn’t hold it.

“Five. Four. Three. Two. O—”

 

The impact was like nothing she’d ever felt. For several heartstopping seconds, she genuinely thought she’d died. Surely, there was no way of surviving the bone-jarring pound of slamming into a warship’s hull at such speed. The impact boom made the pod ride beforehand sound as serene as her father’s tower-top garden at midnight. It eclipsed thunder, dwarfed even the rolling crashes of warp-waves hitting her hull… Even with her ears covered, she was sure she’d be hearing that devastating ocean-crash of sound for the rest of her short, deaf life.

She tried to say, “I think I’m dead,” but couldn’t hear her own voice.

Light streamed into the pod’s far end. Artificial, pale and unhealthy light, it rushed in and brought an unwelcome stink inside with it. She coughed on the pungent stench of unwashed bodies, rusting metal, and human beings shitting themselves for a moment’s sick warmth in freezing corridors.

“Ugh,” one of the Night Lords snorted. “It reeks like Hell’s Iris in there.”

Talos tore his weapons from the wall, and left the pod without a word. His brothers followed. His slaves had to jog to keep up. Octavia was the last to leave, checking her pistol for what was surely the hundredth time.

“Vishi tha?” a voice asked from inside the pod.

She saw Septimus, Maruc, Hound and the giant forms of First Claw ahead in the corridor. For a moment she couldn’t follow, but nor could she look round.

“Vishi tha?” the little girl asked again. It sounded as if she was sat in the pod, waiting on one of the oversized thrones.

“You’re dead.” Octavia squeezed the words through closed teeth. “You’re dead and gone.”

“I can still kill you,” the girl said in sugar-sweet Gothic. Octavia turned, pistol raised, aiming into an empty pod.

“Keep up,” Septimus called back to her. “Come on.”

 

Thus far, it had been a rather bloodless coup—barring a handful of regrettable incidents—and Variel watched the occulus with something approaching pride. The crew were nervous, unsure, excited, polluting the air with sweat-scent and fear-breath, all of which Variel loathed inhaling. He wore his helm just to keep the human stink from invading his lungs, content to breathe his armour’s stale air supply instead.

Why the Night Lords found such things intoxicating was beyond him.

The Red Corsair fleet remained in low orbit, its focus ostensibly on the world beneath their hulls. With vox and auspex worthless, it was impossible to know if any other vessel had even witnessed the infinitesimal boarding projectiles spearing through space to drive home in the Echo’s hull.

The fleet’s sheer scale was a disguise in itself. No armada this size could allow its ships to drift near each other while they rode at orbital anchor, and flotilla formation was a matter of calculating hundreds of kilometres between the biggest cruisers. The fleet’s outrider vessels plied the distances between the bulkier warships, ready to react to threats breaking from the warp farther out in the system.

He watched a destroyer squadron sail past, their sleek dagger-prows cutting between the Covenant and the Echo. The squadron’s speed remained the same throughout; with fluid, arcing trajectories, they rode the void to another cluster of cruisers.

A routine patrol. All was well.

“Lord?” asked the female officer he’d unwittingly and unofficially promoted, purely by virtue of her proximity to him at the moment of a murder.

“Yes?”

“Captain Caleb is… active, sir.”

 

He hadn’t waited long.

The purge was no accident, and no mere malfunction. Nothing had triggered the bioweapon alarms within the hangar, which ruled out any actual threat. The launch deck still lingered in vacuum, with the bay portal shieldless and left open to the void. Ice crystals glittered in a delicate rime across what little equipment remained in the hangar, painting the metal gunships with a patina of frost.

The gunships weren’t fuelled yet. That ruled out the most obvious solution, even if their thrusters could be fired in cold vacuum.

Caleb Valadan possessed many virtues that made him an effective leader, but patience was most assuredly not one of them. Someone, somewhere, had tried to kill him on his own ship. And someone, somewhere, was going to pay for it very shortly.

He crossed the launch bay in a slow stride, his boots mag-locking with each step. Once he reached the immense doors leading back into the ship, he stroked his hand across the rimed steel, brushing aside the fast-forming ice dust.

These doors couldn’t be cut, couldn’t be cleaved. Depressurising the rest of the ship wasn’t even a worry—the hangar doors were supremely thick, cored by dense metals, designed to resist anything that could endanger the vessel.

Beneath his helm, his brand-scars were itching again. The freshest one—imprinted for the sixth time in as many days to stave off his regenerative healing—was still raw enough to be painful. Balls of the Gods, what he wouldn’t give to scratch it.

Caleb withdrew his hand, leaving crystals of glitter-frost drifting in the lack of air.

“Marauders,” he said over the short-range vox. “If we can’t cut our way in, we’ll cut our way out.”

 

Variel tilted his head. He’d not seen this coming, either.

The beetle forms of his distant brothers began their halting march across the weightless bay, boots keeping them tight to the deck. Caleb was at the lip, only metres from walking out onto the external hull.

Variel forced his teeth to unclench. This was not his role, and he was losing his temper. If he’d desired a position of command, he’d have betrayed his way to one long ago.

“Activate bay security fields,” he said.

Intolerable. Truly intolerable.

 

Caleb spoke several languages, from Old Badabian to the trade-tongue of Hell’s Iris, used as a communal lexicon by the station’s native population. He swore now in every language he knew, which took some time. Then he turned to his men. Already, grey frost was lightening his blood-and-black ceramite. It sprinkled as powder from his joints as he moved.

“Squads Xalis and Dharvan—get over to the far side of the deck and load that Vindicator. We’ll breach the external hull.”

“Sire…”

“Look around you, Xalis. Look around, drink in the beauty of this fine sight, and ask yourself if now is really the time to argue with me.”

 

The image on the occulus shook, but it was too distant from the bridge to feel any translated tremors.

A Vindicator siege tank’s primary weapon mount was known among the Adeptus Astartes as a Demolisher Cannon. The weapon’s most renowned use had been ten thousand years before, when the Traitor Legions used hordes of them at the feet of Titan god-machines to breach the walls of the Emperor’s Palace.

Variel licked his teeth in distracted thought as the occulus image filled with drifting shards of twisted metal, chopping out of the smoke. He wondered how many of them had just died in that ill-advised escape plan, and suspected it was a great many.

 

“Close your eyes,” Talos warned.

Their pod had struck the ship’s underbelly, not far from the prow, leaving them relatively close to their destination. She’d never really seen the Night Lords hunt before, never seen others’ reactions to them. The crew members they did pass broke and fled at the first sight of the intruders. Whether they ran to hide or raise the alarm made no difference. First Claw let none of them live long enough to do either. Bolters banged and bucked in steady grips, implanting mass-reactive shells into the backs and legs of fleeing humans. Gladii and knives—a quick stab, a clean cut—finished off those who writhed on the ground.

Several of the people they passed were Nostraman. To a man, these fell to their knees before the warriors of the Eighth Legion, speaking praises and blessings to see such a potent reminder of their annihilated home world.

The Night Lords moved quickly, efficiently, one of them always levelling a bolter to cover the others. Seeing them like this, it was almost hard to believe the truth of how they loathed each other.

She didn’t hear them talk, just the clicking tells of vox-channel chatter. They weren’t silent by any means, with their armour growling loud enough to wake the dead, but nor were they devoid of grace.

Septimus moved at her side, his pistols drawn. Maruc huffed and puffed, his lasgun tight against his heaving chest. Hound, shortest by far, struggled to keep up at all. His mutilated features were strained by the exertion. He used his shotgun as a walking stick, and yet again, she found herself wondering how old he was.

Throne, the ship stank. If they were supposed to live here after this, she prayed someone had plans to clean it. More than once they passed dead bodies stuck to the floor in stages of advanced decay. Rot hung in the air like it belonged.

Everything made of metal sported a wet tarnish of corrosion and grime.

The Covenant was cold, and it was dark, and it was often dank. But this matched sailors’ tales of Archenemy ships. The Venomous Birthright was a Chaos ship, right through to its sickened core. She was already worried about bonding with the machine-spirit, and how abused the vessel’s soul would be when she met it at the end of this journey.

“Close your eyes,” Talos warned.

 

Her name was Ezmarellda.

The fluid she bathed in was an ammoniac clash of nutrient-rich ooze long turned foetid, and half a decade’s worth of her own urine. She was naked but for the scaling that hardened her flesh, and she was blind but for the fact she could stare into the Sea of Souls.

Her hovel was a dark chamber with the floor given over to a bowl depression, which she swam, drifted and walked through, as the mood took her. The edges of her rank pool were too high for her to reach, leaving her trapped in a pit of her own filth. She heard them enter, and her malformed face twitched this way and that. What should’ve been a mouth gummed ineffectively together, making wordless sounds whose meaning was lost to anyone but herself.

When Octavia saw her, she saw her own future laid bare. All Navigators suffered devolution as the centuries passed. She knew that. But this…

First Claw moved around the pool, and Ezmarellda tried to follow each of their movements by the tread of their armoured boots. She had no way of knowing that five bolters were aiming right at her.

Septimus covered his mouth, even though his eyes were closed. Maruc turned to throw up, though nothing he could’ve contributed to the pool would have made it any worse. Hound did nothing, either because he’d never been able to see, or because he was inured to such things. He stared at Octavia, as he always did.

Octavia had no reason to close her eyes. She was the only one bearing witness to this, and in a way, she was grateful. This was Navigator business. This was as Navigator business as things could possibly be.

“Can we use her?” Xarl asked in a crackle of vox. He’d not seen it, yet still his bolter tracked its every twitch.

Octavia didn’t answer.

The Navigator turned at the sound of Xarl’s voice. Ezmarellda waded through her liquid muck on clubbed limbs, drooling and smiling. She treaded water in the ripe, watery slime, and reached up with hands that had already begun a painful fusion into clawed flippers.

“Hello.” The Navigator’s voice was creakingly infantile—a grandmother with her mind lost to dementia, speaking the way she had as a little girl. Saying a single word sent blood-pinked drool trickling down her chin, and she seemed eager to speak, to say more, apparently unaware of how difficult it was for her to form words.

Octavia touched the offered limb, her fingertips soft against its leathery flesh.

“Hello,” she said back. “Did… Huron bring you here? To live?”

Ezmarellda turned in the water, her twisted spine making it difficult to remain in one position for long. As she moved, a bleached skull rolled up from below the water, bobbing on the scummy surface.

“This is my ship.” The Navigator licked at her melted lips with a flapping black tongue. “This is my ship.”

Octavia backed away.

“No,” she said. “We really can’t.”

Five bolters opened up in perfect unity.

 

There was no way she’d get down in the water.

Octavia sat by the doorway, her back against a wall gone mouldy with eternal condensation.

“I can pilot us from here.”

Talos conceded to it easily, given the circumstances. “I will leave Uzas and Xarl to watch over you.”

She nodded, but didn’t thank him.

Maruc was still staring in horror at what floated face-down in the reddened ooze below. “Throne of the God-Emperor,” he said for the fourth time.

“He wasn’t a god,” Cyrion said with an edge of irritation in his tone. “I know. I met him once.”

 

The chamber looked worse with her eyes closed. She saw as Ezmarellda had seen, the layers of bloated, cancerous corruption clinging invisibly to everything around her. The Sea of Souls had lapped against this ship’s hull in the past, but the taint hadn’t yet taken true root. Its blight was brought by its crew, not nestled within the iron bones.

At first, the machine spirit flinched away from her, despite its power. She moaned as she reached to her wrist, screwing the connection valve implanted there and locking the interface cable tighter.

You are not my Navigator, it told her, just as the Covenant once had. Its voice was deeper, yet more guarded.

Yes, I am, she repeated the same words she’d pulsed to the other ship so many months before. My name is Octavia. And I will treat you with more respect than any other Navigator you’ve sailed with.

Suspicion. Disbelief. The suggestion of claws hidden in psychic sheaths. Why?

Because that is how my father raised me.

+ Jump + an intruding voice wavered through her thoughts. The sorcerer, Ruven, on the Covenant. + Octavia. Jump +

We have to sail, she told the Echo.

Show me the way.

+ Now +

Now.

Now.

 

At the edge of the Red Corsair armada, two warships fired their engines with calculated precision. They both drifted forwards, gaining speed, their hulls parallel in form as well as formation.

Destroyer squadrons were already en route. Several other cruisers were coming about, their captains aiming to blockade the accelerating capital ships.

The void tore open before both ancient strike cruisers as their armoured prows punctured through from this realm into the next. With a swirl of colours reminiscent of migraines and madness, the twin wounds in reality burst open to swallow both vessels whole.

The inbound ships shivered as reality reasserted itself. On their bridges, captains cursed to find their weapons now locked on empty space.

 

The Covenant of Blood tore back out of the warp soon after, manifesting several star systems away as its commander had intended.

Their warp-wake would take an age to track, mixing with the undercurrents already swirling around Vilamus from such a huge fleet arriving only hours before. The Exalted felt no cause for concern.

Freed of the coronal flares, the warship’s systems came back to life with a rising swell of power and muted sighs of relief from the crew.

“Auspex, aye.”

“Vox, aye.”

But the Exalted was barely listening. The creature raised itself from its throne, and gazed out into the black.

“Where is the Echo of Damnation?”