‘Yeah, because that makes dying so much better,’ she said.
‘Are you denying me access to the bridge?’ said Vitali.
‘Affirmative, Magos Tychon,’ confirmed the praetorian. ‘Do you wish me to submit a priority access request to Magos Blaylock?’
‘No, I want you to open the damn door.’
‘Your request cannot be completed at this time.’
Vitali turned to Emil and the others.
‘Master Nader, Master Siavash, I’d cover my ears if I were you. And, Mistress Sylkwood, please mute any noospheric-capable communion receptors if you please. I apologise in advance for what will, I’m sure, be most unpleasant.’
Emil knew better than to ask why and pressed his hands hard over his ears as Vitali turned back to the intransigent praetorian. Adara followed his example as Kayrn thumped the heel of one palm to the side of her head.
Vitali squared his shoulders and addressed the praetorian again. ‘I didn’t want to have to do this, but you’ve left me no choice.’
Before the servitor could answer, Vitali unleashed a shriek of violent binary from his chest augmitters. Even with his hands clamped over his ears, Emil felt it like someone had just detonated a bomb in the centre of his skull. Sylkwood dropped to one knee, her face twisted in pain.
As painful as Vitali’s binaric shriek was for them, the effect on the praetorians and weaponised servitors was far more spectacular. Relays within iron skulls exploded and implanted doctrina wafers melted upon receipt of self-immolation protocols. Every synaptic connection within the servitors’ heads blew instantaneously. Orange flames licked from their eye sockets and fatty smoke curled from those whose mouths were not already sealed shut. The stalk-limbed praetorian crashed to the ground, its weapon arms falling limply to its sides. Bipedal combat servitors fell where they stood, like remotely piloted automatons whose operators had been abruptly yanked from their immersion rigs.
The grating, screeching wail rose and fell, like a novice vox-operator trying to find an active channel. Blood dripped from Sylkwood’s nose, and veins like power couplings stood out on the side of her neck.
Then, mercifully, it ended.
‘What did you do?’ asked Emil, gingerly taking his hands from the side of his head.
‘To many aboard the Speranza, I may be the eccentric stellar cartographer Archmagos Kotov dragged from obscurity,’ said Vitali, ‘but I am also a high magos of the Adeptus Mechanicus. There isn’t a cyborg aboard this ship I don’t know how to destroy.’
Vitali stepped over the smouldering corpses of the combat cyborgs. Their limbs twitched with rogue impulses as the molten remnants of their brains disintegrated in the wake of Vitali’s binaric holocaust.
The towering bridge doors began to open.
‘And now I’m going to kill the abomination that murdered my daughter,’ said Vitali.
Flickering lights and arcs of energy were nothing unusual on Exnihlio, but the amber shimmer dancing in a steelwork canyon between two soaring coolant towers had nothing to do with the designs of Archmagos Telok.
Everything on Exnihlio was angular and harsh, but this light grew steadily from a graceful ellipse to a wide oval, some five metres in height. Where it touched the ground, it flattened to form a harmoniously proportioned, leaf-shaped archway.
The sounds that issued from the light were laments from an ancient age, a time before the rise of mankind, and spoke of the profound sorrow of a dying race that could never be articulated in mere words.
A figure stepped from the fluid light, monstrously tall, but slender-limbed, fleshless and formed from a gleaming material that had the appearance of the most flawless ceramic. Its emerald skull was an elongated teardrop, its shoulders vaned with sweeping spines like wings. Its arms looked too thin to be dangerous, but each had the power to crush steel and stone and flesh.
Uldanaish Ghostwalker was a wraithlord, and he had fought in the armies of Craftworld Biel-tan for seven centuries. Two of those centuries had been as a disembodied spirit, bound to this wraithbone warrior-construct by unbreakable bonds of duty.
Ghostwalker rose to his full height, and spread both arms out to either side, the weapons extruded from his fists ready to destroy any target that presented itself.
None did, and the armoured giant took a step to the side as more figures followed it from the honeyed light. First to follow the wraithlord onto the surface of Exnihlio was Ariganna Icefang, exarch of the Twilight Blade Aspect Shrine. Clad in plates of emerald and gold that overlapped like drake-scale and sinuously adapted to her form as though more flesh than armour, she was the perfect warrior in every way. One hand was a bladed claw, while her other held an enormous chainsabre.
A pack of hunched warriors followed her, bulkily armoured in jade and with helms of ivory. Stinger-like mandibles flickered at their cheek-plates, and each had a pistol and sword at the ready.
Following the Striking Scorpions came the Howling Banshees, warrior women clad in form-fitting flex-armour and gracefully sculpted plates of ivory and crimson. Like their more heavily armoured cousins, the Banshees carried swords and pistols, but had an altogether faster, lighter appearance that belied their exquisite lethality.
Last to step through the sunset gate was a lithe figure in rune-etched armour of gold, green and cream. An iridescent cloak of subtly interwoven gold and emerald billowed from Bielanna’s shoulders, and a scarlet plume flew from her antlered helm. Alone of the eldar, she did not have a weapon drawn, her filigreed sword still belted at her waist.
No sooner had Bielanna set foot on Exnihlio than a cry of pain escaped her lips. She staggered as though struck and dropped to her knees. The sunset gate faded like a forgotten dream.
The eldar warriors formed a circle around their farseer, weapons at the ready. Bielanna climbed unsteadily to her feet, looking around her as though unsure of what she was seeing. Imperial worlds tasted of rancid meat and burned metal, ripe with the overwhelming reek of mon-keigh desires, a maelstrom of fleeting, venal emotions, but the voice of this world was utterly singular in its ambition.
The force of it almost drove her to her knees once more.
‘Farseer?’ said Ariganna Icefang, looming over Bielanna.
Bielanna struggled to master the sensations roiling within her. Her psychic senses were being assailed by a push and pull of fates, interwoven destinies of the warriors around her and… and what?
‘I see it all…’ she whispered, shutting her eyes to keep the assault on her senses from overwhelming her.
‘What do you see?’ said Ariganna Icefang.
‘Conflicting futures and unwritten histories,’ gasped Bielanna.
Farseers trained their entire lives to read the twisting weave of the future within the skein, and as much discipline was required to keep the innumerable possibilities that would never come to pass at bay.
But no amount of training and devotion could keep this confluence of past and future from swamping her.
‘The futures grind against one another,’ said Bielanna. ‘Each strains to move from potential to reality, and their struggle to exist will destroy them all.’
‘Speak plainly,’ said the exarch. ‘Can you find the mon-keigh?’
Bielanna tried to answer, but the words stuck in her throat as she looked up into the Striking Scorpion exarch’s war-mask.
Ariganna’s helm was hung with knotted cords of woven wraithbone and psycho-conductive crystal, but Bielanna saw beyond the smooth faceplate to the exarch’s cruelly beautiful features. The Aspect Warrior’s eyes were gateways to madness, filled with the monomaniacal fury of inescapable devotion to death.
Bielanna saw not one face, but three. Each true in its own way.
A youthful face, flush with the newly awakened promise of femininity. The face of seasoned womanhood, freighted with wisdom. And lastly, a crone, burdened and ravaged by life’s savagery.
‘The three in one,’ said Bielanna. ‘The Maiden, the Woman and the Crone… All future a
nd past weave together here and nothing will ever be the same.’
Her gaze moved to Tariquel, whom she had known as a dancer before the bloody song of Khaine had drawn him to the Shrine of the Twilight Blade. His face was as she remembered it when he had wept to the Swans of Isha’s Memory. Delicate as a wraithbone web-sculpt, tender as moonlight on the surface of a lake.
Vaynesh the poet, who had laughed in the field of corpses on the surface of Magdelon, was similarly transformed. Bielanna saw the face of the boy he had once been, the vain, prideful killer he had become and the serene death-mask that loomed in his future.
Bielanna saw the same dance of ages in every face. She saw each warrior as they once were and who they might yet be.
She sobbed as Ariganna placed a clawed gauntlet on her shoulder.
‘The mon-keigh,’ demanded the exarch. ‘Can you find them?’
‘This world hangs over a precipice,’ said Bielanna. ‘And should it end, the effects will be like unto the Fall.’
‘I care nothing for this world,’ hissed the exarch. ‘You spoke of a cuckoo in the nest, a mortal marked by another of your kind?’
Bielanna nodded. ‘Roboute Surcouf, yes…’
‘Can you find him?’
The face of the mon-keigh appeared in her mind, constant and unwavering. She had marked him aboard the human starship, hadn’t she? She remembered that, but assailed by phantom images of an unlived past and a thousand futures, she was no longer sure her memories could be trusted.
‘I can,’ she said.
‘Then do so,’ said Ariganna, turning from Bielanna. ‘The murder of our kin must be repaid in the blood of their deaths.’
‘Death?’ said Bielanna, her mind afire with the possibilities opened up by Ariganna Icefang’s words. ‘Is death the only answer?’
‘The only one worth knowing,’ said the exarch.
‘It is the only one you know how to give, Ariganna, but does that make it the right one? Nothing is ever as straightforward as life or death, right and wrong.’
The exarch stood before her, threat radiating from her every movement.
‘All your visions have led us to doom, farseer,’ said Ariganna. ‘Give me a reason to trust them now.’
Bielanna forced a clarity to her mind that she knew was as fragile as a promise between lovers.
‘An infinite web of possibility spreads from this moment,’ she said. ‘And every one hangs upon a single thread, but whether we are to cut that thread or preserve it is beyond my power to see.’
‘Then you have no answer I can use.’
‘No,’ agreed Bielanna.
‘Just lead me to the mon-keigh,’ said Ariganna.
Bielanna nodded and conjured the image of Roboute Surcouf into her mind’s eye. She felt his presence on this world burning strongly, a mortal with a bright thread that was all too easy to discern amid the barren, lifeless scab of this world’s skin.
‘They are close,’ said Bielanna. ‘Very close.’
‘Good,’ said Ariganna, clenching a fist above her head. ‘We move swiftly, and then we will see what death may do.’
Everyone on the bridge felt it. Like a red-hot skewer had just been jammed up through the bases of their skulls. Implanted servitors spasmed in silvered implant bays, heads rolling slack as synaptic-breakers cut the connection between the machines in their skulls and the Speranza.
A data prism blew out on the ceiling, sending multi-spectral bands of data-light skewing in all directions. Alarm chimes sounded and noospheric warnings streamed up like smoke from the smooth floor.
Magos Tarkis Blaylock, Fabricatus Locum of the Speranza, had cognitive speed enough to shut down his receptors in time to avoid the worst of the binaric assault, but not all of it. His vision blurred and he gripped on to the armrests of the command throne as he felt his internal gyros lose all sense of spatial awareness.
Kryptaestrex stomped away from his data hub, trailing sparks from where an inload cable had fused to his blocky outline. The component parts of Azuramagelli’s disembodied brain flared with electrical disturbance. Even Galatea staggered at the force of it, two of the machine-hybrid’s legs collapsing as its brain jars crackled with internal forks of energy.
Blaylock felt full awareness return in time to register the fact that the main door to the bridge was opening. Not the cog-toothed iris the bridge crew used to pass back and forth, but the towering portal itself. All fifty metres of its height were grinding back on squealing hinges, dislodging centuries of dust and flakes of corrosion.
How long had it been since that door had opened in its entirety?
Blaylock’s vision was still hazed with static, but he had enough clarity to recognise Vitali Tychon and three members of Roboute Surcouf’s crew: pilot, enginseer and hired gun. The force of belligerent code surging through Magos Tychon’s floodstream shocked Blaylock, the binaric forms assembled in their most aggressive, direct format. His noospherics were as hostile as anything Dahan had blurted.
Blaylock’s vocals were offline. He switched to flesh-voice.
‘Magos Tychon, what is the meaning of this?’
‘Stay out of this, Tarkis,’ said Vitali, pointing one of his delicate, multi-fingered hands towards the forward surveyor array. ‘I’m here for that thing. That murderer.’
Blaylock assumed his aural-implants had been damaged. Tychon was pointing towards Galatea.
‘What are you talking about, Magos Tychon? What murderer?’
‘The thing that calls itself Galatea,’ said Vitali. ‘It killed my daughter.’
‘Quite the opposite,’ said Galatea, rising to its full height once again. Ripples of feedback coiled around its limbs and the silver eyes of its tech-priest proxy body glittered with excess energy. ‘Her flesh is dead, that is true, but your daughter’s mind is very much alive, Magos Tychon. As well you know.’
Vitali strode through the bridge as the Speranza’s systems began restarting with the thudding clatter of resetting breakers. Emergency lights flickered out as the bridge lumens sputtered to life and alert chimes were silenced. Blaylock rose from the command throne and moved to intercept the aged cartographer.
‘Do I take it you know what Magos Tychon is talking about?’
‘We do,’ said Galatea.
‘You cut her skull open!’ wailed Vitali, his voice now cracking under the strain of facing his daughter’s killer. ‘You removed her brain and stuck it in a glass jar!’
‘Where she now resides in harmony, freed from the intellectual limitations of flesh,’ said Galatea. ‘Enriching our neuromatrix with her agile mind and unconventional modes of thought.’
Blaylock now understood. ‘Ave Deus Mechanicus!’
‘The synaptic pathways of Magos Thraimen had deteriorated to the point where it became impossible to justify his presence within our neuromatrix,’ continued Galatea. ‘His hibernation nightmares were exquisite, but the presence of such an exceptional brain in the form of Mistress Tychon made his continued presence indulgent.’
‘I’ve come to destroy you,’ hissed Magos Tychon. ‘I’d say kill, but you have to be alive and possess a soul in order to die.’
Blaylock felt a cataclysmic build-up of killing binary within the noosphere. He knew what Magos Tychon intended. And as biological as it was, Blaylock even understood his need for retribution.
But he could not allow him to continue.
ordered Blaylock, his augmitters freighted with every last one of his rank signifiers to countermand Tychon’s war-code. Mistress Tychon’s father reeled with the force of Blaylock’s commands, his face lit with grief as his disassembler cant was splintered into harmless code fragments.
‘No! Blaylock, no…’ said Vitali, stumbling onto the central dais and reaching out to him, half mad with grief. ‘That thing murdered my Linya. You must let me do this.’
‘I cannot, Magos Tychon,’ said Blaylock, backing away from Tychon. ‘You know how deeply Galatea has enmeshed itself with th
e Speranza. If you kill it, you kill us. I cannot let you do this.’
He sat down in the command throne and turned his gaze upon the squatting machine-hybrid. ‘Though I dearly wish I could.’
Magos Tychon fell to his knees, gripping Blaylock’s arms.
‘Please, Tarkis, kill it,’ pleaded Tychon. ‘You must know it will never let the Speranza go. Kill it now!’
‘He cannot,’ said Galatea. ‘Logic sits high in the mind of Magos Blaylock. He knows that to kill us is to destroy any chance of his advancement in the Cult Mechanicus, and Tarkis so wishes to return to Mars, don’t you, Tarkis?’
‘They will burn you on Mars,’ said Blaylock. ‘They will never accept you.’
‘We believe they will,’ said Galatea, cocking its head to the side. ‘With such a powerful advocate as you at our side, how could they not?’
Blaylock shook his head, disgusted that Galatea would ever think he would stand alongside it in support. He sensed a deeper meaning to the machine-hybrid’s words, but this was not the time to consider them.
‘You’re going to let it get away with killing Linya?’ said a young man, throwing off the restraining arm of his fellows. He had no augments to provide identifying signifiers, but Blaylock’s internal database of embedded non-Mechanicus crew produced his name virtually instantaneously.
Adara Siavash. His entry listed no world of origin, but even a cursory bioscan suggested Ultramarian genestock. That, in turn, suggested a heightened sense of justice that could prove volatile in an already highly charged situation. Tears of grief streaked the young man’s face.
‘Come on, Adara,’ said Emil Nader, the Renard’s pilot. ‘I know you were soft on Miss Linya, but this is just crazy. And trust me, I know crazy.’
Nader’s words and the boy’s own tears told Blaylock that the boy had been hopelessly in love with Linya Tychon. Which marked him as a fool and even more dangerous.
‘Adara, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but please listen to Emil,’ said the enginseer – Kayrn Sylkwood, a Cadian who had been mustered out of her regiment following a devastating loss of vehicles during the latest war spasms around the Eye of Terror. ‘If Vitali can’t take it down, what chance do you have?’