Fedualis gave a cry and fell sideways, only the swift reaction of Aeschelus stopping him banging his head on the unforgiving deck. Crouching, he lowered the astropath, who had fallen into a coma, breathing shallow but steady.

  ‘We’re through!’ Qurius’ announcement was part sob and part cry of joy. ‘We’re through the breach! Praise the Lord of Light! Hail the Master of Terra!’

  Aeschelus stood and surveyed the strategium. They were back in realspace but there were fires and sparking conduits to deal with, and he could feel the crushing weight of the soul dampening had returned. It took him several seconds to gather his wits.

  ‘Praxa­medes, damage control,’ he finally ordered, coming to his senses. ‘Nem­etus. Find out where we are.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘There will be no further insubordination.’ Simut glared down at the stooping plasmancer. Lacking legs, she could not kneel as was expected; instead she inclined herself almost parallel to the floor of the command chamber. ‘Be grateful that I will restore minimal protocols to your control.’

  ‘Barely enough to function,’ replied Ah-hotep, bitterness flooding from her cortical aura. Simut was surprised at her defiance. Did she really think her position so secure that she could openly flout his commands?

  ‘But enough to function, plasmancer,’ the overlord reminded her. ‘You almost destroyed one of my ships with your foolish behaviour.’

  ‘My ship, Simut.’ Ah-hotep rose up. Simut could feel her energy matrix probing at the data network of the tomb ship, accessing its sensor hierarchy. ‘Its systems are restoring. There was no danger.’

  ‘A ship sworn to my service.’

  ‘A temporary gift from the technomandrites.’

  Mention of the enigmatic tech-brokers gave Simut a moment of concern. Was Ah-hotep’s belligerence a deliberate plan or just a symptom of her alliance with the technomandrites? Doubts flickered through his proteon synapses.

  ‘Why did you not trust me?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Why this attempted conspiracy with my royal warden?’

  ‘There was no conspiracy, merely communication, my lord,’ Phetos interjected. ‘I would not have allowed anything to happen that harmed your body or threatened your position.’

  ‘You judged poorly, but the blame lies with Ah-hotep for entreating your help.’ Simut leaned forward, the metal of his arms resting on his knees. He could recall the memory of the posture, more than he could genuinely feel it. Everything about his manufactured body was like a misaligned lens, a fraction removed from true synchronicity. The passing of aeons had not been kind.

  ‘The ship did not escape,’ Ah-hotep protested. ‘The end vindicates our decisions.’

  ‘Vindication? You are vindicated only if I decide it is so! I am your lord and judge.’ Simut accompanied his words with a chastising control pulse that sent the plasmancer spinning across the chamber, landing with a crash to skid across the floor. The hum of deactivating stasis tombs flooded the room followed by the matched tramp of feet as the lychguard advanced around the throne dais and surrounded the plasmancer, weapons at the ready.

  ‘You think me an idiot,’ snarled Simut. ‘If you are right, perhaps I am stupid enough to destroy you and risk the ire of the technomandrites.’

  Simut descended the steps, gleaming energy coiling about his skeletal form. The lychguard parted to allow him to stand over Ah-hotep.

  ‘Am I stupid, Ah-hotep?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You forgot something.’

  The plasmancer looked up at him, eyes flaring jade for a moment before dimming with subservience.

  ‘No, my lord.’

  Simut stood there for a while longer, making his superiority plain. When he tired of displaying his dominance he stepped back, conjuring a manipulative field to draw the plasmancer up from the floor, as one might extend a hand. He had made his point, it would be unseemly to gloat.

  ‘We cannot brook any more delays,’ Simut announced, returning to his throne. ‘If we do not make back the time we lost in the last system the Silent King will be displeased. With both of us.’

  ‘I agree, my lord.’ Ah-hotep hesitantly drifted closer. ‘It is why we could not risk any outside interference.’

  Simut waved away her attempts at justification. ‘There will be no conquest. I will annihilate the occupants of this star system without pause, and when they are all dead we shall erect the resonator unopposed.’

  He felt reluctance from both the plasmancer and Phetos.

  ‘There is a problem with my edict?’

  ‘It would be safer to secure the resonator site and use its powers to subjugate the humans, than attempt to fight a full-scale war with them, Bountiful Font of the Dynasty’s Wisdom, Marshal of the Skies,’ said the royal warden. ‘Drawn out conflict could prove costly.’

  ‘Not as costly as wearing out the patience of my cousin,’ Simut replied. ‘The expenditure of resources will be worth the expediting of our goal.’

  ‘What would you have me do?’ asked Ah-hotep. ‘My ship is still repairing itself, but I can–’

  ‘Nothing,’ Simut told her. ‘I want nothing of you, plasmancer. Speed is the vital component of this plan. King Szarekh values the completion of the task to schedule more than the continued existence of the system inhabitants. Zozar and his skorpekhs will lead the first attack.’

  ‘You would unleash the Destroyers first, my lord?’ Ah-hotep’s spinal tail whipped in agitation. ‘I thought them a resource of last resort.’

  ‘You thought wrongly.’ Simut motioned to Phetos with a regal nod, accompanied by the databurst of the command protocols that would unlock the Destroyer-quarantined tombs. ‘They are a weapon. One that I have been too reluctant to use, which has cost me standing in the eyes of the king. I have perhaps confused mercy with prudence and the project has been placed in jeopardy. A mistake I will not make again – for the humans or my servants.’

  The jolt of forced translocation shuddered through Ah-hotep as she materialised on the twilit command deck of her ship. Simut’s casual use of his matter transporters was possibly his least edifying trait. It was symptomatic of his entire outlook that he treated his fellow nobles as nothing more than chattel to be shunted around as he desired. The overlord seemed particularly prone to using it as a form of chastisement against the plasmancer, with full knowledge of how humiliating it was to be thrown across the void at will.

  Systems were minimal but recovering after her desperate protocol override. As promised, Simut had restored canoptek services and the rudimentary command protocols. Other systems, including weapons and the stasis chamber activation core, had been triple-locked against cortical incursion. The overlord was taking no chances that Ah-hotep might access her own military potential.

  The energy surveyors were her primary concern. She needed to know what was happening in the system and fleet. Ah-hotep had no doubt that the necrons would meet with swift success behind the onslaught of the Destroyers, but at what cost? Every time they were forced to ­resurrect a warrior, every canoptek contact and cryptothrall engagement risked the Destroyer malaise spreading into a new part of the system – a system to which her own protocols were now adjoined thanks to Simut’s overbearing presence.

  Drifting back and forth across her dimly lit mastaba, Ah-hotep directed the canoptek swarms and higher beings to focus their attention on the sensor suite.

  It did not take long for the primary detectors to come back on line, augmenting her personal energy sensory field a thousand-fold. While secondary systems initialised, Ah-hotep turned her artificial eye on the residue of the astromantic detonation she had caused, curious to see what physical fallout had occurred.

  A variety of physical debris remained, spiralling slowly away from the point of catastrophic failure. A spectrum of radioactive particles and energy waves formed beautiful patterns of electromagnetism and plasma, overlaying each other in synchronous circles. Ah-hotep wished she could drain those expanding clouds, her hunger breaking the moment of delight. Drawn by the desire to feed, she lingered awhile, imagining supping on negative particles and collapsing photon streams.

  She was about to return to a more mundane scan of the target world – more importantly the circling moonbase, where she had detected so much astromantic activity – when a spark drew her attention.

  At first she wondered if it was a remnant of the broken starship’s drives or energy generator. Electrical fluctuations betrayed a working power system, which further scrutiny soon revealed to be a functioning reactor shield. It was still possible that this was some protected core that had somehow been ejected in the detonation, but that supposition ­disappeared the moment it changed course…

  Something else. Another ship?

  She reviewed the memory store and saw nothing to suggest that two vessels had been trying to escape. If the gleaming dot she traced across the voids was a ship, it must have come through almost at the instant the other starship had exploded.

  Who were they? Unwitting victims of the offensive about to commence, or reinforcements brought by the cries of the humans before the overnull had silenced them?

  For the time being the ship would be invisible against the vast backdrop of the system energy base and the distortion of the fleet’s presence. It was only because Ah-hotep had been focused on that small segment of the void that she had noticed it at all.

  Simut would not have seen it.

  Which meant it was imperative that, for now at least, Ah-hotep kept the newcomer a secret.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Ithraca’s Vengeance crawled through the outer void with engines, augurs and life support systems running on minimal power to preserve the strained reactors. Armed with only the most basic information about their surroundings, Nem­etus studied the charts and databanks in an effort to narrow down their location. Given the length of time they had spent in the warp, their trajectory uncontrolled, he barely knew where to begin.

  Basic sensor sweeps picked up the local star and the main orbital bodies, but any more detailed information was restricted to just a few hundred thousand miles in the immediate vicinity. Several worlds within the ecozone were potential candidates for habitation, so on the basis that the inner system would be more densely populated than the outer orbits, Captain Aeschelus had set course in-system.

  Without any other information, Nem­etus decided that the best way to locate the system out of the several hundred identified by the cogi­tators was to make a manual observation of the local starfield. The servitors of the navigational banks would be able to retro-calculate the location of the Ithraca’s Vengeance from the observable stars, like an ancient ship’s master sailing the Aeneid Sea on Macragge but on a vaster scale. With this in mind, he took a dataslate with a videograph attached up to the main gallery on the prow decks, furthest from the polluting glare of the plasma engines.

  The viewing gallery was a glassite dome about sixty feet high, situated above the strategium. The system star dominated the view ahead, the eagle-break prow of the cruiser pointed towards the growing circle of light. Above gave the best view of the starfield, dense clusters of distant suns spread across the inner spiral arm of the galaxy. Nem­etus recognised none of them.

  While he took notations and videolithic data the door hissed open and Praxa­medes joined him. The other lieutenant also had a recording slate in hand.

  ‘Checking that I am doing this correctly?’ said Nem­etus. The words came out with more venom than he had intended, stopping Praxa­medes mid-stride.

  ‘I thought you might like some help.’ The other lieutenant lifted a hand towards the star-filled void. ‘That’s a lot of cataloguing to do.’

  The humble offer made Nem­etus feel even more guilty for his accusation. There was only one way Nem­etus knew how to remedy the situation: head-on.

  ‘Apologies, brother. You did not deserve my scorn. I cannot help but feel you think me inferior, but it is only the shame of my short­comings making themselves known.’

  ‘I have never known you to be anything other than a superb leader and a devout servant of the Emperor,’ said Praxa­medes, starting forward again. ‘Even I would find this task onerous, but it is a vital one.’

  ‘Thank you, brother. All assistance is welcome.’

  They stood side by side scanning for several minutes before the silence had gone on too long and Nem­etus could not help but break it.

  ‘How are the repairs coming along?’

  ‘Slowly. The main power network is badly damaged, hampering other efforts. The tech-priests are dedicating more time to rerouting the cabling and restoring reactor integrity. We’re fortunate that none of the shielding broke when we force-translated back to realspace.’

  Nem­etus considered this for a few seconds.

  ‘Was that a rebuke, brother?’ Nem­etus half-laughed, to hide the doubt in his question. ‘I cannot tell any longer.’

  ‘An observation. What prompted you to activate the warp drive?’

  ‘It was purely instinctual. I was worried that we would lose the opportunity altogether. The captain had already brought down the Geller fields. I reasoned that we had one chance to escape.’

  ‘Reasoned, or guessed?’ Praxa­medes asked the question lightly but Nem­etus could feel the weight of it.

  ‘There was no time for reason, brother,’ he argued, remembering why he thought Praxa­medes was constantly scrutinising him. ‘Had I waited even another second we might never have broken through the barrier.’

  ‘And if you were wrong? Not for a second had you considered the possibility that the forces unleashed would tear the cruiser apart.’

  ‘The situation required action. If it had been you, would you have triggered the warp jump?’

  ‘No,’ confessed Praxa­medes. He studied his slate for a few seconds. ‘I would not have gambled all of our lives on a guess.’

  ‘We were adrift in the warp. There was nothing to lose. It was no gamble.’

  ‘I disagree. There may have been another opportunity. We might have engineered a more certain solution. Future possibilities that you rashly ignored.’

  Nem­etus lowered his dataslate to look at his battle-brother. Praxa­medes kept his eye fixed on his readings, whether from diligence or to avoid his brother’s gaze was not clear.

  ‘None of us are feeling right,’ said Nem­etus. ‘The whole company is tense. The serfs are confused, easily distracted. We cannot afford to have divisions between us.’

  Praxa­medes finally turned his eyes on Nem­etus, sighing heavily. ‘You want me to accept your mistakes without comment for the sake of morale?’

  ‘I do not accept that I made a mistake,’ Nem­etus snapped. ‘And I do not seek your judgement. We are all alive because of what I did. There was not going to be a second chance.’

  He moved away, turning his back on Praxa­medes. Since his arrival Nem­etus had been aware of the differences between him and his brother-lieutenant but they had never seemed to affect their ability to fight together before. Now he wondered if Praxa­medes really would be second-guessing every decision.

  ‘It isn’t judgement,’ Praxa­medes said, following him. ‘I’m trying to understand how you think. You and the captain, you have this manner, this quickness about you that I can’t replicate.’

  ‘Why would you want to?’ Nem­etus turned, surprised by the confession. ‘Why be something you are not?’

  Praxa­medes did not reply. He turned his stare back to the swathe of stars.

  ‘You think it is holding you back from command?’ guessed Nem­etus. ‘The captain keeps choosing me over you for battle command.’

  ‘Not just the captain. I had a ship command but was then assigned to the captain as his second. Why was that? What did Battle Group Command not see in me?’

  ‘I cannot speak for others, but I would rather follow Aeschelus with you as his second. He has a hunger that you temper. Can you imagine what trouble he and I would get into without your presence?’

  Praxa­medes did not seem amused by the thought, lost in his concerns.

  ‘Did you hear me? You would make a… You are not listening to me, brother. Is it the warp effect dulling your thoughts?’

  ‘Can you see that?’ Praxa­medes asked, lifting a finger to point out of the great arched window. ‘That light.’

  Nem­etus looked, scanning quickly across the stars until he saw what Praxa­medes was indicating. A bluish globe.

  ‘Some kind of dust lensing?’ suggested Nem­etus, though his hearts started beating a little faster.

  ‘After-warp mirage?’ said Praxa­medes, with equal lack of conviction.

  Nem­etus looked carefully, trying to see with his eyes, not his hopes.

  ‘Too regular to be a star or other stellar phenomenon. It’s a station,’ said the lieutenant, hearts speeding. ‘A star base of some kind. Outer system Mandeville defence, perhaps?’

  Praxa­medes shared a glance and the ghost of a smile. ‘I guess we won’t need these any more,’ he said, lifting his dataslate.

  ‘I will keep mine,’ Nem­etus replied. ‘You should report this to the captain.’

  ‘If it’s an Imperial station, that would be almost a miracle.’

  ‘Maybe those prayers of the Navigators did some good after all,’ said Nem­etus.

  Praxa­medes nodded and hurried away.

  Nem­etus turned his attention back to the window and wondered what new challenges were coming. There was no way it could be an Imperial facility. That would be far too convenient for a ship of Fleet Quintus.

  Closing with the seemingly dormant space station, the Ithraca’s Vengeance was a shadow of its former power. Only one bank of void shields was operational, and those only available if they ran on power diverted from the engine array. The ship could have top speed or energy shields, but not both. Similarly, augurs and long-range communications were both crippled by the crash-drop from warp space – translating from the unprotected warp to the crushing reality of realspace had overloaded nearly every sensor spine and vox-circuit. Reactor power was steadier than before, but only eighty per cent of normal operational capacity. Red-robed tech-priests were all over the strategium, the fragrance of their incense burners and holy lubricants almost blotting out the stale sweat and bodily fluid odour of monotask servitors and sleep-deprived armoury attendants.

 

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